Trimming comments in HTML documents using Apache Ant

This short article, explaining how to trim unnecessary code (comments, empty lines) from HTML documents, is a follow-up to an article published a couple of weeks ago on this blog: Building Web Applications With Apache Ant. Basically, the idea is to use Ant’s optional replaceregexp task as shown below:

<target name="-trim.html.comments">
    <fileset id="html.fileset"
        dir="${build.dir}"
        includes="**/*.jsp, **/*.php, **/*.html"/>
    <!-- HTML Comments -->
    <replaceregexp replace="" flags="g"
        match="\<![ \r\n\t]*(--([^\-]|[\r\n]|-[^\-])*--[ \r\n\t]*)\>">
        <fileset refid="html.fileset"/>
    </replaceregexp>
    <!-- Empty lines -->
    <replaceregexp match="^\s+[\r\n]" replace="" flags="mg">
        <fileset refid="html.fileset"/>
    </replaceregexp>
</target>

Update: Use this code very carefully as it is dangerous territory (Thanks to my co-worker Ryan Grove for pointing out some of the shortcomings)

6 thoughts on “Trimming comments in HTML documents using Apache Ant”

  2. Pingback: Web Application Construction Tools » Chris Norton

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  4. Steve

    How do you prevent the regex from removing Javascript enclosed in HTML comments in order to hide it from browsers, which have Javascript disabled?
    I fiddled around a lot but never managed to get ant ignore comments which end with //->. It always results in an infinite loop. :-(

  6. Jaime Bueza

    Here’s one for removing console.log within a combined yui compressed file.


    <replaceregexp file="my_combined_file.js" match="(console\.log\(.*\))" flags="g" replace="\/\/\1"></replaceregexp>

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