Compressing or decompressing JavaScript

JavaScript is widely used for designing websites. While writing the JavaScript code, we use several white spaces, comments, and tabs for readability and maintenance of the code. This causes the file size to increase, and as the file size increases, so does the time taken to load the page. Hence, most of the professional websites use compressed JavaScript for fast loading. This compression (also known as minified JS ) is mostly squeezing white spaces and newline characters. Once JavaScript is compressed, it can be decompressed by adding enough white space and newline characters, which makes it readable. This recipe is an attempt to produce similar capabilities in the shell.

Getting ready

We are going to write a JavaScript compressor or obfuscation tool as well as a decompressing tool. Let's consider the following sample JavaScript:

$ cat sample.js
function sign_out()
{ 

  $("#loading").show(); 
  $.get("log_in",{logout:"True"},

  function(){ 
    window...