How to add CSS support to ctags

Posted: December 22, 2006, by garry

Any vi head knows how important the tags file can be. Unfortunately, the stock version of Exuberant ctags does not have support for CSS. Never fear, I will show you how to compile in Iago Rubio's CSS ctags parser into ctags.

First of all, Iago's parser was hard for me to find (his web site is not in English), so I keep a copy here: css.c Download it and put it with the rest of your ctags source.

Next, download the ctags source from: http://ctags.sourceforge.net. Version 5.6 is current at the time of this writing. Unarchive it, change to the directory w/ the source code, and drop in css.c from above.

cd ~/src
... download ctags tarball here ...
tar xzvf ctags-5.6.tar.gz
cd ctags-5.6
wget http://scie.nti.st/dist/css.c

You will now need to make 2 small changes to a couple files, very basic stuff. Just apply this diff (automatically with patch or do it by hand):

--- ctags-5.6-stock/parsers.h   2006-05-29 21:37:12.000000000 -0700
+++ ctags-5.6/parsers.h 2006-11-25 18:40:28.000000000 -0800
@@ -24,6 +24,7 @@
        CppParser, \
        CsharpParser, \
        CobolParser, \
+       CssParser, \
        EiffelParser, \
        ErlangParser, \
        FortranParser, \

--- ctags-5.6-stock/source.mak  2004-06-09 20:01:17.000000000 -0700
+++ ctags-5.6/source.mak        2006-11-25 18:28:45.000000000 -0800
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@
        beta.c \
        c.c \
        cobol.c \
+       css.c \
        eiffel.c \
        entry.c \
        erlang.c \
@@ -65,6 +66,7 @@
        beta.$(OBJEXT) \
        c.$(OBJEXT) \
        cobol.$(OBJEXT) \
+       css.$(OBJEXT) \
        eiffel.$(OBJEXT) \
        entry.$(OBJEXT) \
        erlang.$(OBJEXT) \

Now do the "./configure && make && make install" dance like normal and your new ctags binary will generate tags for CSS also!

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Older Comments

mark on December 23, 2006 05:14 PM

Hey don’t know much about these tags, but I can tell you that I don’t think your tags in mephisto are rendering correctly. All of them are ”#”, which typically means that the object is being rendered directly to the page.

Garry on December 23, 2006 09:18 PM

Ah.. you might be right, tnx :)

timespent on October 22, 2008 03:27 AM

Two bugs I fixed: There was a space-tab after each tagname in the ctags output from css.c: ex: tagname \t… This prevented vim from finding the tags. I “fixed” this using ctags vStringStripTrailing(). It works, and I hope I did well—but it would be nice if this were reviewed.

The .classes (beginning with a period) were not found by vim. I’m sure they’re nice to be there, but they won’t let me lookup <tag class=”classname”> as there is no period on the keyword in that case. I removed these, but did not touch those for #id’s, etc.

Here is the patch (I hand-edited the -stock/ directory names below. It was css-orig.c and css.c here).

- ctags-5.6-css-stock/css.c 2006-12-22 02:33:19.000000000 -0800 + ctags-5.6-css/css.c 2008-10-22 03:15:48.000000000 -0700 @ -38,6 +38,9 @ + if (kind == K_CLASS) { + vStringStripTrailing(name); + } vStringTerminate (name); makeSimpleTag (name, CssKinds, kind); vStringClear (name); @ -117,8 +120,10 @ // pick first char if alphanumeric is a selector if( isalnum ((int) *line) ) state = parseCssDeclaration( &line, K_SELECTOR ); - else if( *line '.' ) // a class + else if( *line ’.’ ) { // a class + line++; state = parseCssDeclaration( &line, K_CLASS ); + } else if( *line == ’#’ ) // an id state = parseCssDeclaration( &line, K_ID ); else if( *line == ’@’ ) // at-rules, we’ll ignore them

static void makeCssSimpleTag( vString *name, cssKind kind, boolean delete )
{

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