User-level extend for import syntax?

[thybzi]

Please tell me if LESS has any kind of API (or whatever) to extend import syntax (add one more option).

What I want in my project is the following:

@import (standalone) 'foo';

That should do the following:

@import 'foo__deps'; // if file exists
@import 'foo';

Of course, that seems to my some custom functionality, so I don't want to change less.js code itself, but make some kind of module or plugin.
Is that possible in any way?

Thank you in advance.

[seven-phases-max]

Please tell me if LESS has any kind of API (or whatever) to extend import syntax (add one more option).

Well, you can't change syntax (i.e. what's handled by the parser), however depending on what you actually need (and how you're going to handle it... plugin?) there might be some options. After all, if it's plugin you will have to handle all the selector elements on your own anyway, so in fact any tag (or whatever) there can serve as a keyword, i.e. extend(#foo.bar whatever) is valid Less syntax hence no problem to use whatever tag as an option - i.e. just like all in extend(#foo.bar all)).

---

@import 'foo__deps'; // if file exists

Again it depends on why you actually need that. When I see something like above I start to suspect something like this. Aside of that, why, for example, can't you just have an empty 'foo__deps' file there?

[calvinjuarez]

You might look at a plugin like https://github.com/less/less-plugin-npm-import as an example of how a plugin affecting @import behavior might work.

[thybzi]

Thank you for the example!
So, closing this issue now.