CSS styled-components: Extending styles and changing element types

In this article, we’ll learn how to use CSS styled-components to extend styles and change element types. Styled-components is a tool that combines CSS styles with React components. It provides an elegant way to define styles for components, making code easier to maintain and reuse.

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What is styled-components?

Styled-components is a CSS-based library for creating and managing styled components. It allows you to define component styles using CSS syntax and generates unique class names to ensure isolation between styles. Compared to traditional CSS, styled-components provides more powerful and flexible features, making your code more modular and reusable.

How to use styled-components?

To use styled-components, first install the dependencies:

npm install styled-components 

You can then import styled-components in your React components and start using it. Here’s a simple example:

import React from 'react'; 
import styled from 'styled-components'; 

const Button = styled.button` 
background-color: #007bff; 
color: white; 
padding: 10px 20px; 
border-radius: 5px; 
font-size: 16px; 
`; 

const App = () => { 
return ( 
<div> 
<Button>Click me</Button> 
</div> 
); 
}; 

export default App; 

In the code above, we create a styled-components component named Button and define some CSS styles for it.

Extending Styles

Styled-components allow you to extend existing styles, making it easy to create different variations of a component. You can use the “extend” operator to inherit styles from other components. Here’s an example:

import React from 'react'; 
import styled from 'styled-components'; 

const BaseButton = styled.button` 
background-color: #007bff; 
color: white; 
padding: 10px 20px; 
border-radius: 5px; 
font-size: 16px; 
`; 

const PrimaryButton = styled(BaseButton)` 
background-color: #28a745; 
`; 

const SecondaryButton = styled(BaseButton)` 
background-color: #dc3545; 
`; 

const App = () => { 
return ( 
<div> 
<PrimaryButton>Primary</PrimaryButton> <SecondaryButton>Secondary</SecondaryButton>
</div>
); 
}; 

export default App; 

In the code above, we create a base styled component named BaseButton and extend both the PrimaryButton and SecondaryButton components. By extending styles, we can quickly create different button types.

Changing the Element Type

Using styled-components, you can also change the element type of a component. This is useful when you need to change the default element type. For example, you can style a div element as a button like this:

import React from 'react'; 
import styled from 'styled-components';

const Button = styled.div`
background-color: #007bff;
color: white;
padding: 10px 20px;
border-radius: 5px;
font-size: 16px;
cursor: pointer;

&:hover {
background-color: #0056b3;
}
`;

const App = () => {
return (
<div>
<Button>Click me</Button>
</div>
);
};

export default App;

In the above code, we use styled-components to style a div element as a button. This allows us to change the element type as needed without having to change the entire component code.

Summary

In this article, we introduced how to use CSS styled-components to extend styles and change element types. styled-components is a CSS-based library that seamlessly integrates with React components, allowing us to define styles at the component level and providing more powerful and flexible functionality. By extending styles and changing element types, we can easily create different component variations to meet diverse design needs. We hope this article has helped you understand how to use styled-components!