Sass Nested Rules and Properties

Sass nesting CSS selectors is similar to HTML's nested rules.

Below, we nest the styles for a navigation bar:

Sass Code:

nav {
  ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
  }
  li {
    display: inline-block;
  }
  a {
    display: block;
    padding: 6px 12px;
    text-decoration: none;
  }
}

In this example, the ul, li, and a selectors are nested within the nav selector.

Converting the above code to CSS code, it looks like this:

CSS Code:

nav ul {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  list-style: none;
}
nav li {
  display: inline-block;
}
nav a {
  display: block;
  padding: 6px 12px;
  text-decoration: none;
}

Sass Nested Properties

Many CSS properties have the same prefix, such as font-family, font-size, and font-weight, and text-align, text-transform, and text-overflow.

In Sass, we can write them using nested properties:

Sass Code:

font: {
  family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
  size: 18px;
  weight: bold;
}

text: {
  align: center;
  transform: lowercase;
  overflow: hidden;
}

Converting the above code to CSS code, it looks like this:

CSS Code:

font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: bold;

text-align: center;
text-transform: lowercase;
text-overflow: hidden;