Minifying final HTML output using regular expressions with CodeIgniter

Question

Google pages suggest you to minify HTML, that is, remove all the unnecessary spaces. CodeIgniter does have the feature of giziping output or it can be done via .htacce

Answer 1

For those curious about how Alan Moore's regex works (and yes, it does work), I've taken the liberty of commented it so it can be read by mere mortals:

function process_data_alan($text) // 
{
    $re = '%# Collapse ws everywhere but in blacklisted elements.
        (?>             # Match all whitespans other than single space.
          [^\S ]\s*     # Either one [\t\r\n\f\v] and zero or more ws,
        | \s{2,}        # or two or more consecutive-any-whitespace.
        ) # Note: The remaining regex consumes no text at all...
        (?=             # Ensure we are not in a blacklist tag.
          (?:           # Begin (unnecessary) group.
            (?:         # Zero or more of...
              [^<]++    # Either one or more non-"<"
            | <         # or a < starting a non-blacklist tag.
              (?!/?(?:textarea|pre)\b)
            )*+         # (This could be "unroll-the-loop"ified.)
          )             # End (unnecessary) group.
          (?:           # Begin alternation group.
            <           # Either a blacklist start tag.
            (?>textarea|pre)\b
          | \z          # or end of file.
          )             # End alternation group.
        )  # If we made it here, we are not in a blacklist tag.
        %ix';
    $text = preg_replace($re, " ", $text);
    return $text;
}

I'm new around here, but I can see right off that Alan is quite good at regex. I would only add the following suggestions.

1. There is an unnecessary capture group which can be removed.
2. Although the OP did not say so, the