Using Sass Maps to Save Time in CSS

30 August 2014 (0)

Sass is a superset of CSS that “compiles” down to regular CSS usable by any browser. It adds features such as functions, logic, and loads more.

Sass already had the concept of lists that allow a one-dimensional list of values to be defined; Sass 3.3 introduced maps – a series of key-value pairs.

Defining a Sass Map

To define a variable called team-colors containing a map of values (in this case a map of soccer teams and their colors):

$team-colors: (
    australia: #F7AD31,
    england: #FFF,
    sweden: #FFE700,
    japan: #435AAD
);

Iterating over a Sass Map

Now we can iterate through all the team names and access their color values:

@each $team, $color in $team-colors{
    .#{$team} {   
        background-color: $color;
  }
}

This will create a CSS class with the name of the team (using Sass interpolation syntax) and its associated background color:

.australia {
  background-color: #F7AD31;
}

.england {
  background-color: #FFF;
}

.sweden {
  background-color: #FFE700;
}

.japan {
  background-color: #435AAD;
}

There’s also a number of functions for manipulating maps such as map-get and map-has-key.

 

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