gulp-css-urlencode-inline-svgs

Data URIs make sprites easier. SVGs make resolution independence easier. Putting them together seems like an obvious win. You might think that because the contents of an SVG is just XML text, you could just paste them right into your stylesheets! But the spec says that data:image/xml+svg must be URL encoded. So you still need to pass them through an encoding stage like you would for base64'ing other image types.

Here's a gulp plugin that does that. It works on plain CSS so put it in your pipe after your compiler and autoprefixer, but before your minifier.

Example Usage

var urlencode = require('gulp-css-urlencode-inline-svgs');

gulp.task('styles', function () {
  gulp.src('src/styles/index.scss')
    .pipe(sass())
    .pipe(prefix())
    .pipe(urlencode())    // New hotness
    .pipe(cssmin())
    .pipe(gulp.dest('public'));
});

Input

background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8, <svg version="1.1" ... etc

Output

background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8, %3Csvg%20version%3D%22 ... etc

Features

• Enables cross-browser compatibility for inlining SVG data-URIs
• That's the only thing it does, because that's what gulp plugins are supposed to do.
• It also has the most unwieldy name of any gulp plugin, so there's also that.

TODO

• Support streams? I guess
• Default line delimiter is }\n. Might want to provide a different one.
• Needs tests for proper plugin compliance.