variable in name

[Gidon]

Hi,

INTRO:
I'm working on a website that supports both LTR and RTL. So far I made
two stylesheets, one for LTR and one for RTL. The RTL stylesheet
imports the LTR stylesheet and "overrides" those items that are RTL
specific. (padding-right vs padding-left etc).

float: right/left I manage by having a variable called @side (and
@side-opposite) and setting it to the correct side in both stylesheets
(in RTL it is "right", and in LTR it is "left"). In my LTR stylesheet
I write : float : @side

That was the intro....
QUESTION:
I would also like to eliminate the "overriding" issue, to keep my code
more DRY.

The ultimate thing would be if I could write:

.bla {
padding-@side: 20px;
}

I thought I might use the format function, but it only allows me to
format the value of the property, and not the key. ( as in
format("padding-{0}: 20px", @side) ).

Is there anything out there , that I oversaw, that allows me to do
this or something similar?


Thanks a lot (again).
Gidon

[James Foster]

I've been thinking about that. Imagine the following

@var: xyz;
.class-#{@var} {
property-#{@var}: "abc #{@var}";
}

This is based on a feature from sass. Where sass sees the #{}
construct it evaluates the contents as an expression. So you could put
operations and functions I'm there. The above would output

.class-xyz {
property-xyz: "abc xyz";
}

We'd have to think carefully about syntax but I'd love to have
something like this in dotless.

Thoughts?

[Gidon]

I'm all for it.

The only thing is that besides my use, I don't see a lot of other uses
for it. (although probably my case is probably helpfull for many RTL
programmers).

BTW, does .LESS have IF statements? Because than I could solve the
same issue as follows:


@direction: ltr;

.fn-padding-left(@value: 0)
{
[if @direction = ltr]
padding-left: @value;
[else]
padding-right : @value;
[endif]
}

this is also a good option, and i can see many other uses for this.

[Gidon]

Is there a plan to implement this?

On May 24, 5:18 pm, James Foster <james....@gmail.com> wrote:

[James Foster]

No, not in the short term at least. And not without careful consideration of the syntax.

It might be an idea to post an issue here asking about this.

github.com/cloudhead/less.js/issues

because if it makes it into less.js it will definitely make it into dotless.

James