[TxMt] Bundle to alphabetize CSS rules

[pete otaqui]

Hello 'Mates,

I'm working on a bundle (my first!) to alphabetize css attributes, as  
described by Garrett Dimon here:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/architecting_css/

I whipped up some 'working' (as in, it works on a 2000+ line CSS file  
I threw it at) code here, which has some obvious problems.  Here are  
the key parts, all in PHP:

[code]

function find_rule()
{
	global $input, $nOffset;
	$nStart = strpos($input,'{',$nOffset);
	if ( $nStart === false ) return false;
	$nEnd = strpos($input,'}',$nStart);
	$nOffset = $nEnd;
	$nLen = $nEnd - $nStart + 1;
	$aReturn[] = $nStart;
	$aReturn[] = $nLen;
	// return an array containing the start index and length of the next  
rule
	return $aReturn;
}

function alphabetize_rule($sRule)
{
	preg_match_all('/[^:\s]*:[^;}]*;?/',$sRule,$aProps);
	sort($aProps[0],SORT_STRING);
	$sRule = implode(' ',$aProps[0]);
	$sRule = '{ '.$sRule.' }';
	return $sRule;
}
?>

[/code]

The problems, that I can see anyway, are in the regular expressions,  
since a CSS rule can contain URLs and URLs can legitimately contain  
both un-escaped semi-colons and I think even curly brackets.  I can  
spend a bit more time on those to search for '(' and ')' and allow  
those characters between, so that's fine.

My real question is if anyone has any thoughts about managing the  
whitespace that separates the rules.  Generally I write CSS all on one  
line, and my code will return attributes separated by spaces.  Ideally  
I'd like it to respect how the coder has written their CSS already,  
leaving any newlines and indentation in place.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how best to do this?  Do you think  
this bundle would be useful?

Many thanks for any feedback.

Pete