[Tip] Workaround for incorrectly removed attributes

[red-meadow]

Hi!

I've found several issues here caused by incorrectly removed HTML attributes, and I've recently opened a new one. I'd like to share my workaround, hoping it might be useful to someone, until a better solution is available.

The basic idea is to replace incorrectly removed strings with a unique string sequence and restore them after minification. My example is in Python, but it can be easily adapted to other programming languages.

def unique_id():
    # uuid.uuid1() is a function from Python standard
    # library that generates unique ids
    return str(uuid.uuid1())

strings_to_preserve = [
    ['target="_self"', unique_id()],
    ['type="text"', unique_id()] 
]

# Replace strings with unique ids that will be preserved
for string, id in strings_to_preserve:
    html = html.replace(string, id)

minified = minify_html.minify(html)

# Replace preserved ids with original strings
for string, id in strings_to_preserve:
    minified = minified.replace(id, string)

I haven't tested this approach beyond attributes, but it should likely work for other cases as well.