Minification

Minification is the process to remove elements that are useless in a PHP code, without changing its execution.

For example, whitespaces and comments may be removed from PHP code: it makes the code much smaller, but also, less readable.

Minified code has a smaller footprint on the disk, and may be faster to load, read and process. In PHP, it has very limited impact, and is not considered an optimisation technic.

Minification is applied successfully on HTML, CSS, SVG, XML, JSON, Javascript, and image formats.

Minification may be used for obfuscation.

Unminify is the contrary to minify.

<?php

// minified version
for($i=0; $i<10;++$i) { print "$i\n";}

// minified version
for($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) {
    // This displays a number
    print "$i\n";
}

// structure that cannot be minified
echo 1 . 2; // displays 12
echo 1.2; // displays 1.2

?>

See also Minify PHP: Should you do it? The Helpful Tools For it?, PHP minify and The State of Minification in PHP – How 1 Project Grew into 6.

Related : Obfuscation

Related packages : php-code-minifier/php-code-minifier