Minify/compress CSS with regex?

Question

In PHP can you compress/minify CSS with regex (PCRE)?

(As a theoretical in regex. I\'m sure there are libraries out there that do this well.)

_Background

Answer 1

Here's a slightly modified version of @Qtax's answer which resolves the issues with calc() thanks to an alternative regex from @matthiasmullie's Minify library.

function minify_css( $string = '' ) {
    $comments = <<<'EOS'
(?sx)
    # don't change anything inside of quotes
    ( "(?:[^"\\]++|\\.)*+" | '(?:[^'\\]++|\\.)*+' )
|
    # comments
    /\* (?> .*? \*/ )
EOS;

    $everything_else = <<<'EOS'
(?six)
    # don't change anything inside of quotes
    ( "(?:[^"\\]++|\\.)*+" | '(?:[^'\\]++|\\.)*+' )
|
    # spaces before and after ; and }
    \s*+ ; \s*+ ( } ) \s*+
|
    # all spaces around meta chars/operators (excluding + and -)
    \s*+ ( [*$~^|]?+= | [{};,>~] | !important\b ) \s*+
|
    # all spaces around + and - (in selectors only!)
    \s*([+-])\s*(?=[^}]*{)
|
    # spaces right of ( [ :
    ( [[(:] ) \s++
|
    # spaces left of ) ]
    \s++ ( [])] )
|
    # spaces left (and right) of : (but not in selectors)!
    \s+(:)(?![^\}]*\{)
|
    # spaces at beginning/end of string
    ^ \s++ | \s++ \z
|
    # double spaces to single
    (\s)\s+
EOS;

    $search_patterns  = array( "%{$comments}%", "%{$everything_else}%" );
    $replace_patterns = array( '$1', '$1$2$3$4$5$6$7$8' );

    return preg_replace( $search_patterns, $replace_patterns, $string );
}