Unicode minification

[privatenumber]

I noticed one of my asset files was minifying 25% worse with esbuild compared to Terser. I looked into it and it looks like it's because of how esbuild handles unicode. For example, Terser preserves "丂", but esbuild seems to convert it to "\u4E02".

I'm wondering if it's possible to preserve these characters as is.

For reference, I linked the Terser and esbuild minified versions of the asset here.

[lukeed]

You can use charset for this

[evanw]

Yes, this is easy to change: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#charset. It's not done by default both because Unicode can sometimes cause code to break if you haven't configured your server to send the appropriate Content-Type headers, and because Unicode also makes your JavaScript slower to parse.

[privatenumber]

Thank you both!!

[lukeed]

That's a super interesting V8 post, thanks for sharing