What term describes removing unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality?

• A. minify
• B. optimize
• C. compress
• D. sanitize

Answer: (A)

Minification is about reducing the size of source code by stripping out nonessential characters—like whitespace, comments, and extra line breaks—without altering how the code executes. The goal is the same behavior with fewer bytes, which speeds up loading times for web assets such as JavaScript and CSS. Sometimes identifiers are shortened as part of minification, but the important point is that the code’s functionality remains unchanged. This differs from compressing, which typically refers to encoding data to shrink it for storage or transmission and requires decompression to run; optimizing is a broader idea of making code faster or smaller but not limited to removing characters; sanitizing is about cleaning inputs to prevent security issues, not about reducing code size.