Valid CSS classes?

Question

Are the following valid class names?

.text-moretext

.text&text

.text_text

.text(text)

I suppose is any CSS class allowed to contain special chracters?

Dupe of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/448981/what-characters-are-valid-in-css-class-names — slikts, Oct 12 '09 at 13:55

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 12 '09 at 14:03

Yes, you can use any character in a class name except for whitespace which separates class names: class is a cdata-list. Some characters would need escaping. For HTML:

<div class="text&amp;moretext"> ... </div>

and in a selector:

.text\&text { ... }
.text\(text\) { ... }

It's generally best to avoid where possible for coding sanity, but yes you can do it if you need to.

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 12 '09 at 14:04

According to the CSS Specification, Section 4.1.3:

In CSS, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in selectors) can contain only the characters [a-zA-Z0-9] and ISO 10646 characters U+00A1 and higher, plus the hyphen (-) and the underscore (_); they cannot start with a digit, or a hyphen followed by a digit. Identifiers can also contain escaped characters and any ISO 10646 character as a numeric code (see next item). For instance, the identifier "B&W?" may be written as "B\&W\?" or "B\26 W\3F".

So, .text-moretext and .text_text are valid identifiers (and can be used as class names), while .text&text and .text(text) are not (although as @bobince pointed out, you can escape the special characters in order to use them as part of an identifier).

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 12 '09 at 13:56

2

.text-moretext is allowed
.text&text is not allowed, because the & is a special character in HTML
.text_text is allowed
.text(text) is not allowed

answered Oct 12 '09 at 13:56

Marius

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what about _text-moretext ? – Yannis Dran Jan 26 '14 at 15:49
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@YannisDran `.person__hand--left` is fine. This is a style encouraged by BEM syntax http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head-round-bem-syntax/ – ptim Nov 12 '14 at 00:54

Guffa · Answer 4 · 2009-10-12T14:07:56.837

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Characters A-Z, a-z, digits, hyphen (-) and underscore (_) are the common characters allowed in an class name. (There are some more culture-specific characters allowed, but no other punctuation.)

So, text-moretext and text_text are valid class names.

When in doubt, be restrictive with punctuation and exotic characters. Some older browsers might not always get it right...

edited Oct 12 '09 at 14:07

answered Oct 12 '09 at 14:02

Guffa

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Valid CSS classes?

4 Answers4