cssindent, indent css without going crazy

I needed to write some CSS to style an HTML rendering of some man pages. Sometimes I also write CSS for some simple web applications, most of which simply generate HTML in the Go/C/Python backend and have absolutely no JavaScript anyways.

Sometimes I write the CSS without being careful with formatting, or I copy some badly formatted CSS (e.g. from mandoc). I want to format them to my standard: tabs for indentation, no extra spaces, etc.

I asked for a CSS prettifier that works offline in #web, and that could be hooked up to vim to prettify on save. And I was called a troll because "web dev needs web, duh". (There are nice people in #web, and this small rant is not directed towards #web.)

So here is a simple program to indent CSS. It's not perfect, I'm not going to read 65535 pages of W3C specifications, but it works for my purposes.

(I should probably write a yacc parser, but I guess a simple solution like this works for now.)

Usage

cssindent < input.css > output.css
cssindent < inplace.css | sponge inplace.css

sponge is a rather useful utility that buffers input from standard input and writes it to a file, which makes in-place file changes easier. (Simply using the same file for both input and output redirection would cause the file to be truncated.)