Metadata

About

This is a Parsec-based Haskell CSS parser that follows the W3C CSS3 module syntax draft. For now it simply parses CSS piped to STDIN and prints formatted CSS to STDOUT.

Comments are (currently) stripped from the CSS file because the draft’s grammar ignores them.

In addition to formatting whitespace and removing comments, selectors and declarations are also sorted.

This does not fix CSS errors. It will fail when it encounters them.¹

Here’s a list of things that I will likely do when I have some time and motivation:

• Create a proper Haskell module (and maybe upload it to Hackage).
• Accept command line arguments (e.g. input file, maybe formatting options).
• Maybe add support for keeping comments, but maintaining associations between comments and tokens when sorting declarations requires careful thought and may be more complex than it is worth.
• Add different printers for e.g. compact printing.

Note that I only wrote this as a fun² little exercise to distract me for a bit from a larger Haskell project that I was working on, so don’t bother asking me why I didn’t use some existing application instead.

Usage

Remote CSS file:

curl 'https://bbs.archlinux.org/style/ArchLinux.css' | beautify-css

Local CSS file:

beautify-css < ArchLinux.css > ArchLinux.pretty.css

Examples

Compare the before and after versions in the examples directory.