Do not escape characters in string literals when they are supported by the specified encoding

I was experimenting with babili and found that the minified code it produces is significantly larger than closure (100 KiB vs 120 KiB). As it turns out, the problem is caused by the way babili handles (unicode) string literals.

Suppose that the code contains the string "теѕт" (all Cyrillic characters). Then babili converts it to "\u0442\u0435\u0455\u0442". OTOH, closure with the --charset utf8 option leaves the string in the original form. In fact, with that flag, closure converts "\u0442\u0435\u0455\u0442" to "теѕт".

So I propose to introduce to babili an option similar to closure’s --charset. Of course, this should use a conservative setting by default (eg ascii), because otherwise the minified script would then require to be loaded with charset="..." in the <script> tag.

[rahbari]

Actually minify makes code larger for utf-8 files, for now you can use this: code = code.replace(/\\u([\d\w]{4})/gi, (m, g) => String.fromCharCode(parseInt(g, 16)))

[Mihara]

This seems to be something babel-core is doing, rather than babel-minify.

Your workaround helps, however, babel-minify does this also, if babel-core did not. At least, when used as part of babel-minify-webpack-plugin, when minification becomes a separate stage…