css.escape

What is css.escape?

The css.escape npm package provides a utility for escaping strings to be used as CSS identifiers. It implements the CSS.escape() method, which allows for the escaping of characters that are not valid CSS identifier characters. This is particularly useful when dynamically generating class names, IDs, or other selectors that may contain special characters not typically allowed in CSS selectors.

What are css.escape's main functionalities?

Escaping strings for CSS identifiers

This feature allows you to escape any string to make it a valid CSS identifier. For example, if you have a class name that includes special characters or starts with a digit, you can use css.escape to ensure it's valid. The code sample demonstrates how to escape the string 'my-class' to be safely used as a CSS class name.

"CSS.escape('my-class');"

Other packages similar to css.escape

he

The 'he' package is an HTML entity encoder/decoder written in JavaScript. While it primarily focuses on HTML entities, it can be used in a broader context to safely encode strings for various web contexts, including CSS. However, it's more general-purpose compared to css.escape, which is specifically tailored for CSS escaping.

escape-html

This package provides a simple method to escape HTML characters. Similar to 'he', it's more focused on HTML than CSS. While it can be used to prevent XSS attacks by escaping user input before inserting it into the HTML document, it doesn't specifically address CSS identifier rules like css.escape does.

README

CSS.escape polyfill

A robust polyfill for the CSS.escape utility method as defined in CSSOM.

For a more powerful alternative, consider using cssesc, which automatically takes care of excessive whitespace, and has many options to customize the output.

Installation

In a browser:

<script src="css.escape.js"></script>

Via npm:

npm install css.escape

Then, in Node.js:

require('css.escape');

// On Windows and on Mac systems with default settings, case doesn’t matter,
// which allows you to do this instead:
require('CSS.escape');

Author

Mathias Bynens

License

This polyfill is available under the MIT license.