I've been coding with PHP for maybe a year. So I'm somewhat new to
it. But I've learned quickly, and created a fairly serious LAMP app
that is capable of returning large query results. During my
investigation into various means for incrementally reducing the
response sizes, I've discovered output buffering with a callback
function. So, as an experiment, I bracketed my includes of the
Fusebox files in index.php with ob_start('sweeper') and
ob_end_flush(), and placed the simple callback function at the top of
the file that performs a preg_replace on the buffer to strip all
excess space:
function sweeper($buffer) {
return preg_replace("/\s\s+/", " ", $buffer);
}
Results? Kinda nice! A large query result measuring over 900K of
HTML is reduced to 600K. With no change at the browser. Still valid
HTML, and the browser happily gobbles it up and displays it cleanly.
It's just 30% faster getting to me.
Now, the question. Is this going to bite me in the ass? 'Cause right
now, it looks dang good to me. Great bang for the buck, as far as I'm
concerned. I've been churning it over in my head, and I don't see a
situation (certainly not in my particular app) where doing this
whitespace reduction is going to backfire. There isn't anything in
any of this that requires the contiguous non-word characters.
I have a feeling though, that one of you more learned PHPers are going
to tell me exactly where my ass is gonna start hurtin'.
Christopher Watson
Principal Architect
The International Variable Star Index (VSX)
http://vsx.aavso.org
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