What is css-tree?
The css-tree npm package is a tool for parsing and manipulating CSS. It allows users to parse CSS strings into an abstract syntax tree (AST), walk over nodes in the tree, generate CSS strings, and more. It is useful for tasks such as CSS minification, linting, and transformation.
What are css-tree's main functionalities?
Parsing CSS to AST
This feature allows you to parse a CSS string and convert it into an abstract syntax tree (AST) for further manipulation or analysis.
const csstree = require('css-tree');
const ast = csstree.parse('.example { color: red; }');
Walking the AST
This feature enables you to traverse the AST and apply functions or extract information from specific nodes.
csstree.walk(ast, function(node) {
if (node.type === 'ClassSelector') {
console.log(node.name);
}
});
Generating CSS from AST
After manipulating the AST, you can generate a CSS string from the modified AST, which can be used in stylesheets or injected into web pages.
const modifiedAST = csstree.parse('.example { color: blue; }');
const css = csstree.generate(modifiedAST);
Minifying CSS
css-tree can be used to minify CSS by parsing it with compression options and then translating the AST back to a CSS string.
const compressedCSS = csstree.translate(csstree.parse('.example { color: red; }', { compress: true }));
Other packages similar to css-tree
postcss
PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JavaScript plugins. It can do similar tasks as css-tree, such as parsing, walking the AST, and generating CSS. PostCSS is plugin-based, which makes it more extensible and allows for a wide range of transformations.
sass
Sass is a preprocessor scripting language that is interpreted or compiled into CSS. It offers more syntactic features compared to css-tree, such as variables, nesting, and mixins, but it is not primarily focused on parsing and manipulating existing CSS.
less
Less is another CSS pre-processor, similar to Sass, that extends the capabilities of CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations, and functions. Less and css-tree serve different purposes, with Less focusing on writing CSS in a more functional way and css-tree on parsing and manipulation.
clean-css
clean-css is a fast and efficient CSS optimizer for Node.js and the browser. It focuses on minification, which is one of the features of css-tree, but does not provide a general-purpose CSS parsing and manipulation API.

CSSTree

CSSTree is a tool set to work with CSS, including fast detailed parser (string->AST), walker (AST traversal), generator (AST->string) and lexer (validation and matching) based on knowledge of spec and browser implementations. The main goal is to be efficient and W3C spec compliant, with focus on CSS analyzing and source-to-source transforming tasks.
NOTE: The project is in alpha stage since some parts need further improvements, AST format and API are subjects to change. However it's stable enough and used by packages like CSSO (CSS minifier) and SVGO (SVG optimizer) in production.
Features
-
Detailed parsing with an adjustable level of detail
By default CSSTree parses CSS as detailed as possible, i.e. each single logical part is representing with its own AST node (see AST format for all possible node types). The parsing detail level can be changed through parser options, for example, you can disable parsing of selectors or declarations for component parts.
-
Tolerant to errors by design
Parser behaves as spec says: "When errors occur in CSS, the parser attempts to recover gracefully, throwing away only the minimum amount of content before returning to parsing as normal". The only thing the parser departs from the specification is that it doesn't throw away bad content, but wraps it in the special nodes, which allows processing it later.
-
Fast and efficient
CSSTree is created with focus on performance and effective memory consumption. Therefore it's one of the fastest CSS parsers at the moment.
-
Syntax validation
The build-in lexer can test CSS against syntaxes defined by W3C. CSSTree uses mdn/data as a basis for lexer's dictionaries and extends them with vendor specific and legacy syntaxes. Lexer can only check the declaration values currently, but this feature will be extended to other parts of the CSS in the future.
Docs
Tools
Related projects
Usage
Install with npm:
> npm install css-tree
Use in your code:
var csstree = require('css-tree');
var ast = csstree.parse('.example { world: "!" }');
csstree.walk(ast, function(node) {
if (node.type === 'ClassSelector' && node.name === 'example') {
node.name = 'hello';
}
});
console.log(csstree.generate(ast));
Top level API

License
MIT
1.0.0-alpha.29 (May 30, 2018)
- Lexer
- Syntax matching was completely reworked. Now it's token-based and uses state machine. Public API has not changed. However, some internal data structures have changed. Most significal change in syntax match result tree structure, it's became token-based instead of node-based.
- Grammar
- Changed grammar tree format:
- Added
Token
node type to represent a single code point (<delim-token>
)
- Added
Multiplier
that wraps a single node (term
property)
- Added
AtKeyword
to represent <at-keyword-token>
- Removed
Slash
and Percent
node types, they are replaced for a node with Token
type
- Changed
Function
to represent <function-token>
with no children
- Removed
multiplier
property from Group
- Changed
generate()
method:
- Method takes an
options
as second argument now (generate(node, forceBraces, decorator)
-> generate(node, options)
). Two options are supported: forceBraces
and decorator
- When a second parameter is a function it treats as
decorate
option value, i.e. generate(node, fn)
-> generate(node, { decorate: fn })
- Decorate function invokes with additional parameter – a reference to a node
- Tokenizer
- Renamed
Atrule
const to AtKeyword