compressing javascripts

Hi All,

Planning to do a largish web project and I am looking at javscript to handle a good portion of it. I am assuming JS is transfered as text, like HTML, and not as byte codes, like java.

if this is correct, I wondered if anyone knows of a utilty that would compress javascripts (removing extraneous spaces, tabs, etc). Ideally it would reduce size of user variable names/functions via subsitution.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave,

Check this website out. It will "crunch" the javascript by only removing the whitespace and comments. It doesn't try to rename variables.
http://www.brainjar.com/js/crunch.html

As an interesting side note, this particular javascript compressor is implemented in javascript.

later,

David E. West

What might be a good idea is to keep all the Javascript codes on a js file so that the browser will only take the scripts it needs, it improves download time.

Thanks for both pieces of advice.

The script compressor seems to work pretty well on my JS code so far, so I am happy there.

I may play with it some more and see about var/function compression. Maybe as an "add on" 2 passes, 1st build symobl table optimize names for size, 2nd then resubstitue them.

Dave