Seperate Comments/Whitespace from Production Files | Hacker News Reader

Seperate Comments/Whitespace from Production Files

2 pointsRollAHardSix4 comments

I was curious if anyone has a tool/Dreamweaver method/workflow method for separating white-space & comments out of css/javascript/html files.

I'm almost envisioning a tool that will mark the location of a comment or white-space in a file and will keep track; so that you can strip it when uploading to production, and then when you re-open the file, the tool will insert comments & white-space.

I'm interested if anyone has anything ready, because I could use it for work immediately. However, if nothing exists, or the interface sucks, I guess I now have a side-project to hack on. ^_^

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You might want to look at Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html

In particular, you'll be interested in the @shadow file type, which keeps two versions of a file, one with the "sentinels" marking the structure and one without.

Warning: in my experience, the "sentinels" are prejudiced against collaboration. Either you put the version with sentinels into Git/Hg/Bzr and the merge of changes made by two separate parties is more likely than otherwise to create corrupt files, or you put the version without sentinels under version control, and then your collaborators lose the benefit of the structure or anything else that has been omitted.

Exactly what I'm getting at with using version control on the production file; we don't use a strict testing/production file-system (and I'm not high enough on the food chain to change that) instead someone may open the production file and make changes as they see fit. (not many someone's but still..)

How is a minifier different from what you're describing? I may be missing something, but that sounds very similar to what you want.

Thanks, good question! This should make it a little more clear:

The biggest thing I'm looking for is I don't want to 'lose' my comments; it's just that I don't want them in the final file; and I'm looking for an easier method than keeping two different files (one with and one w/o comments).

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