YUI Compressor: Keep Some Comments

By using the YUI Compressor from Yahoo, JavaScript and CSS files can be compressed so that they use less space - unnecessary comments, blanks and white space are removed, so that the file becomes smaller and can be delivered faster when loading a website.

Reserve Important Comments

However, it is not always desired to actually delete all of the comments in the file. What is with important comments such as a copyright notice at the beginning of the file? This should finally actually remain in the file and should not be deleted.

Exclamation Mark to Keep

Luckily, there is a solution for this problem in the YUI Compressor. We simply write this in our original file:

/*! this comment is kept  */
 
function(a, b, c) {
   /* this comment will be deleted */
   return a + b + c;
}

All comments, beginning with */! will be kept, while all other comments will be deleted. After minimizing, our file will look like this:

/* this comment is kept  */
function(a,b,c){return a+b+c;}