YUI Compressor for JavaScript and CSS

The YUI Compressor can be used to compress JavaScript and CSS files. It also offers a low-security JavaScript obfuscation option via local symbol renaming - it does not rename functions.

The tool requires the Java SDK 1.4 or later and can be run from the command line. The command line is useful because formatted, commented JavaScript can be used for development and compressed versions can be easily generated for test and prod.

To avoid compression build errors, verify your file text encoding. For Visual Studio UTF-8, make sure to select the "Unicode UTF-8 without signature" encoding from the File - Advanced Save Options menu. Then include the charset UTF-8 option in the command.

Example - run as one line

java -jar c:\lib\yui\yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar
c:\code\web\scripts\file.js
-o c:\code\web\scripts\file.min.js
--charset utf-8