CSS Simple Parser

A (S)CSS parser that's tiny, blazing fast and (too) simple.

Features

• Tiny: at ~1.5kb (min + gzip) this is about as small a CSS parser as you can get.
• Blazing fast: on a mid-2014 MBP it takes ~0.03ms, on average when benchmarking, to generate an AST for this ~500 lines CSS string, about 100x faster than PostCSS.
• Nesting: nested (S)CSS rules are supported.

Caveats

The big caveat is that this is not a full-blown CSS parser, it can only parse (S)CSS strings with the following limitations:

• Only rule blocks are supported at the top-level, e.g. no @charset, @import etc.
• No {, } or ; can be used inside strings, e.g. div[attr=";{}"], content: "{}" etc.
• Lastly, the generated AST is quite crude and might require further processing.

Install

npm install --save css-simple-parser

Usage

AST

The AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) provided by this library has the following shape:

type AST = ROOT_NODE;

type ROOT_NODE = {
  parent: null,
  children: NODE[]
};

type NODE = {
  parent: ROOT_NODE | NODE,
  index: number,
  indexEnd: number,
  selector: string,
  selectorIndex: number,
  selectorIndexEnd: number,
  body: string,
  bodyIndex: number,
  bodyIndexEnd: number,
  children: NODE[]
};

Parser.parse

This method computes an AST from the given CSS string.

import Parser from 'css-simple-parser';

const ast = Parser.parse ( '.foo {}' );

Parser.stringify

This method computes a CSS string given an AST.

import Parser from 'css-simple-parser';

const ast = Parser.parse ( '.foo {}' );
const css = Parser.stringify ( ast );

Parser.traverse

This method calls a function with each node found in the AST, the AST is being traversed depth-first.

import Parser from 'css-simple-parser';

const ast = Parser.parse ( '.foo {}' );

Parser.traverse ( ast, node => {
  console.log ( node.selector );
});

Related

• css-flatten: Flattens a nested CSS string, & placeholders are supported too.
• css-simple-minifier: A CSS minifier that's tiny and very fast.

License

MIT © Fabio Spampinato