ESM support

[appsforartists]

I try to avoid CommonJS dependencies, because they can add a lot of infrastructure/code heft that isn't needed in modern browsers.

This module currently has two versions. The only difference is use of a function keyword vs a lambda =>. Lambdas have been mainsteam for 9y now. Modules have been mainstream for 7.

I don't see any easy Babel mods to convert module to export, and that would probably be overkill for a module basically sugar around a one-line regex. Still, for provenance and modularity, I'd rather use your module than inline my own.

Would you be amenable to a v2 PR that removes babel and converts the export format from CJS to ESM? People who need to support really old browsers can stay pinned on 1.0.

[stevenvachon]

Try using Node v23; it solves the whole problem without any code changes.

[appsforartists]

The code I write is all client-side, so I don't actually use Node as anything more than a script interpreter. I don't think the Node version is relevant for me.

My concern was that if you bundled require (e.g. with Webpack or Rollup/Vite), it would have to write a bunch of boilerplate to polyfill require into a browser environment. I remembered hearing that ages ago, so I've been avoiding using CommonJS modules in my builds. This issue made me go test to see what the difference is in Vite 6.2.0.

This is what normalize-html-whitespace resolves to:

  function nv(e) {
    return e &&
      e.__esModule &&
      Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.call(e, 'default')
      ? e.default
      : e;
  }
  var vr, qa;
  function iv() {
    if (qa) return vr;
    qa = 1;
    var e = /[\f\n\r\t\v ]{2,}/g,
      t = ' ',
      n = function (r) {
        return r.replace(e, t);
      };
    return (vr = n), vr;
  }
  var rv = iv();
  const ov = nv(rv)

There is indeed a bit of require boilerplate, but no more than a few hundred characters. I still think CommonJS is obsolete in 2025, but I leave it to you to decide if you want to update the module. It appears my concerns are also less timely now.