This package provides functions to parse a CSS file into a stream of tokens and from that into rules or declarations. The exact algorithm is defined in the css-syntax module (it is the same algorithm that Blink uses since mid 2015 when it replaced their old Bison based parser).

Note: Only the tokenizer is currently implemented here. Parsing the token stream into rules or declarations is available at Stylist Traits.

Motivation

I needed a library which would allow me to process a CSS file, modify all image URLs and write the result to disk. Existing CSS libraries for Haskell either focus only on generating CSS (through a DLS) or parse the source into a format that is too high-level and makes this kind of processing difficult.

A token stream is just the right level of abstraction for that task. The spec defines <url-token> and <function-token>, which is what I needed to extract the image URLs from the source.

More advanced processing likely requires a higher level abstraction than the token stream provides. E.g. to expand vendor prefixes you'll need to parse the token stream into a list of rules and declarations, so you can pick the declarations you want to process.

Motivation 2

I (the second author) needed to preprocess HTML in realtime to make it responsive. Besides other things it requires parsing style=... attribute that can have any amount of junk so I optimized a parser/serializer a lot while still passing all the tests.

Motivation 3

Haskell CSS Syntax is an adopted component of the Argonaut Stack browser engine. A full styling engine can readily be implemented around it!

Tokenizer

The tokenizer uses fast low-level parser (20-50MB/s on average CSS files) to convert the input to a list of tokens. This process removes all comments and collapses consecutive whitespace into a single space character (U+0020). There may be other occasions where the tokenizer looses information from the input stream.

Serializer

Serializer converts list of tokens back to string. Serialization round-trips: tokenizing produces same tokens list as tokenizing, serializing and tokenizing again. Tokenize-serialize pair works at about 15MB/s or more.

Example

In the following example I replace all URLs in the source CSS file with links to predefined image.

import qualified Data.Text.IO as T
import           Data.CSS.Syntax.Tokens (tokenize, serialize)

main :: IO ()
main = do
    source <- T.readFile "path-to-your.css"
    let tokens = tokenize source

    putStrLn $ "The CSS file has " ++ show (length tokens)
        ++ " tokens"

    let newTokens = map f tokens

    T.writeFile "path-to-lolcatted.css" $
        serialize newTokens

f :: Token -> Token
f (Url _) = Url "http://lol.cat/img.png"
f x       = x