NAME

Compress::LeadingBlankSpaces - Perl class to compress leading blank spaces in (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) web content.

SYNOPSIS

  use Compress::LeadingBlankSpaces;

  my $lco_r = Compress::LeadingBlankSpaces->new();
  . . .
  my $source_string = '     some content'."\n";
  . . .
  my $outgoing_string = $lco_r->squeeze_string ($source_string);
  . . .
  my $squeeze_status = $lco_r->format_status(); # to check later...

DESCRIPTION

This class provides the functionality for the most simple web content compression.

Basically, the outgoing web content (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) contains a lot of leading blank spaces, because of being structured on development stage. Usually, the browser ignores all leading blank spaces. Indeed, the amount of those blank spaces is significant and could be estimated as 10 to 20 percent of the length of regular web page. We can reduce this part of the web traffic on busy servers with no visible impact on transferred web content. This could be helpful especially for old browsers incapable to understand modern content compression.

The main functionality of this class is concentrated within the squeeze_string member function that is supposed to be used inside the data transfer loop on server side. The rest of the class is developed to serve possible exceptions, like pre-formatted data within HTML.

In this version of the class, there are three tags those produce compression exceptions:

<CODE ...> ... </CODE>

<PRE ...> ... </PRE>

<TEXTAREA ...> ... </TEXTAREA>

case insensitive in implementation.

Nesting of exceptions is not supported.

AUTHOR

Slava Bizyayev <slava@cpan.org> - Freelance Software Developer & Consultant.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2002-2004 Slava Bizyayev. All rights reserved.

This package is free software. You can use it, redistribute it, and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The latest version of this module can be found on CPAN.

SEE ALSO

Web Content Compression FAQ at http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html

Apache::Dynagzip module can be found on CPAN.