options.space in false should at least keep one for safety

[imcotton]

Consider this edge case:

var/* jsdoc */age = 42;

Which emits:

varage = 42;

[vitaly-t]

That's fairly unusual way of documenting the code.

But of you run into something this strange, option space lets you replace all comment blocks with spaces.

[imcotton]

I for one not seen this form as well, however in Angular v4, they're using this style all over the bundled code.

Set options.space to true has two drawbacks:

1. It leaves quite a lot of blanks
2. it's not default setting

[vitaly-t]

This must have been a recent change in how Angular is now bundled, For I used previous versions of it to test this library, and such things weren't there.

For the time being replacing comments with spaces is the only option, unfortunately, as this issue never came up before.

Later on though, I could extend option space to support an integer - the number of spaces to be used in place of each comment block, which if you set to 1 would give you exactly 1 space in place of each comment.

2. it's not default setting

I honestly do not see it being a drawback.

[imcotton]

Any chance to have fixed without using space option? Compare to uglifyjs

> echo "var/* jsdoc */age = 42" | uglifyjs 
> var age=42

[vitaly-t]

uglify does way more verbose JavaScript parsing, which may be an overkill for such a simple library that was designed to be small and fast.

To get an idea try replacing your example with these, see what uglify does in those cases:

echo "bla/* jsdoc */age = 42" | uglifyjs

and

echo "multi/* jsdoc

multi-line comment block

line */age = 42" | uglifyjs

[imcotton]

Thinking that I can live with space number option.

I honestly do not see it being a drawback.

By drawback I meant the default setting does not as safe as verbose JavaScript parsing, rather be a performance tradeoff in this case.

[imcotton]

Examples like bla/* jsdoc */age = 42 not been valid JavaScript syntax at first, but the space between declaration and identifier shall not be omitted, no?

[vitaly-t]

I will look at extending the space option when i get a chance 😉

[vitaly-t]

Escalating this into a bug, i.e. the library cannot process correctly special-case multi-line comments, removal of which results into code fusion:

var/*comment*/name;
// should become:
var name;
// and not:
varname;

The same with multi-line comments:

var/* multi-line
  comment */name;

Granted this is an edge case, and an odd way of adding comments, but should be supported nonetheless.

Presently it only works when using option space: true.

I have committed the tests + TODO-s that need to be implemented in the code.

A PR to fix the issue would be very welcome!