Rusty HTML Minifying In R with {rextendr}

In my M-F newsletter today I mentioned an awesome Rust-based HTML/JS/CSS minifier library that also include batteries for a few other languages.

There was no R port, so I made one using {rextendr}. The {rextendr} package makes is as easy to use Rust code in R packages as {Rcpp} does C/C++ code.

It was as simple as adding some dependencies to the Rust Cargo.toml file and then adding one Rust function to the main lib.rs file, and writing a thin wrapper function ({rextendr} can do that, too, but I wanted some default function parameters) for the shim. It took almost no time, and now you, too, can use the utility:

library(minifyhtml)

'
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>
  <!-- COMMENT -->
  <style>
    * { color: black; }
  </style>
  <title>TITTLE</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>
       Some text
    </p>
    <script>
      console.log("This is a console log message.");
    </script>
  </body>
</html>
' -> src

cat(minify(src))
## <html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml><meta charset=UTF-8><meta content=width=device-width,initial-scale=1 name=viewport><style>* { color: black; }</style><title>TITTLE</title><body><p>Some text</p><script>console.log("This is a console log message.");</script>

FIN

I have to work out one kink (due to developing on arm64 macOS) and the utility will also be able to minify CSS and JS embedded in HTML.

You can find {minifyhtml} on GitHub.

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