If you want to remove comments from a large number of javascript files

Question

Here is my dilemma:

I am noob (currently interning and helping maintain two e-commerce sites) in javascript. Recently, I was assigned to delete all comments that are found in our javascript libraries (that's over 25,000 comments!). Obviously, I want to find a function or some pre-existing program that can analyze the code by deleting all the characters following // or * / ...

I looked at several available minifiers online, such as Yui, jscompressor.com and uglifyJS, which would make this task more automated, but there are a few problems. Either they are too aggressive (shorten the names of variables, remove all spaces, etc.), Or require you to submit one line or one file at a time. I am dealing with literally 1000.js files.

Additional information: our development environment - Eclipse IDE and xammp; languages ​​- html, php, css.

Any program recommendations that might fit my needs would be great!

Answer 1

Take a look at uglifyjs. It does not compress or mung by default (you need to give the -c and -m options respectively), and you can choose in great detail what types of compression it does, even to the level of specifying a regular expression for which kinds of comments to delete. And you can even print beautifully on output if you are so inclined. So what is the problem with using it?

Answer 2

I know this question has been around for several years, but all the found Javascript comment multipliers that I found were not able to process the Javascript 2.6mb file that I was trying to delete.

I created jsfiddle with the following code, then pasted a 2.6mb file into the text box, and this worked for me:

$("textarea").val($("textarea").val().replace(/\/\*([^*]|[\r\n]|(\*+([^*\/]|[\r\n])))*\*+\//g,"")); /*remove these comment types*/ $("textarea").val($("textarea").val().replace(/\/\/.*/g,"")); // remove these comment types 

https://jsfiddle.net/40okonqo/

Hope this helps someone.

Credit: I used the information found here to help with regex: http://blog.ostermiller.org/find-comment

Answer 3

It is actually not easy to create a regular expression that removes all comments from a javascript document.

The main solution is to use:

  yourJavascriptString.replace(/\/\*.+?\*\/|\/\/.*(?=[\n\r])/g, ''); 

Unfortunately, this does not always work. If you need a more complete solution, visit this website: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/removing-comments-in-javascript/