Sass - Referencing Parent Selectors

Description

You can select the parent selector by using the & character. It tells where the parent selector should be inserted.

Example

The following example describes the use of parent selectors in the SCSS file −

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Referencing Parent Selectors</title>
      <link rel = "stylesheet" type = "text/css" href = "style.css" />
      <link rel = "stylesheet" href = "https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/css/bootstrap.min.css">
      <script src = "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
      <script src = "https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
   </head>

   <body>
      <div class = "container">
         <h1>Example using Parent Selector</h1>
         <a href = "http://www.tutorialspoint.com/"> www.tutorialspoint.com </a>
      </div>
   </body>
</html>

Next, create the file style.scss. Note the use of & character, which specifies where the parent selector should be inserted.

style.scss

a {
   font-size: 20px;
   &:hover { background-color: yellow; }
}

You can tell SASS to watch the file and update the CSS whenever SASS file changes, by using the following command −

sass --watch C:\ruby\lib\sass\style.scss:style.css

Next, execute the above command; it will create the style.css file automatically with the following code −

style.css

a {
   font-size: 20px;
}
a:hover {
   background-color: yellow;
}

Output

Let us carry out the following steps to see how the above given code works −

Save the above given html code in parent_selectors.html file.
Open this HTML file in a browser, an output is displayed as shown below..
Here & will be replaced with the parent selector a. When you hover on the link, it will display background color as yellow.

sass_css_extensions.htm