react-inlinesvg

One of the reasons SVGs are awesome is because you can style them with CSS. Unfortunately, this winds up not being too useful in practice because the style element has to be in the same document. This leaves you with three bad options:

1. Embed the CSS in the SVG document
   • Can't use your CSS preprocessors (LESS, SASS)
   • Can't target parent elements (button hover, etc.)
   • Makes maintenance difficult
2. Link to a CSS file in your SVG document
   • Sharing styles with your HTML means duplicating paths across your project, making maintenance a pain
   • Not sharing styles with your HTML means extra HTTP requests (and likely duplicating paths between different SVGs)
   • Still can't target parent elements
   • Your SVG becomes coupled to your external stylesheet, complicating reuse.
3. Embed the SVG in your HTML
   • Bloats your HTML
   • SVGs can't be cached by browsers between pages.
   • A maintenance nightmare

But there's an alternative that sidesteps these issues: load the SVG with an XHR request and then embed it in the document. That's what this component does.

Note

The SVG <use> element can be used to achieve something similar to this component. See this article for more information and this table for browser support and caveats.

Usage

import SVG  from 'react-inlinesvg';

<SVG
    src="/path/to/myfile.svg"
    preload={<Loader />}
    onLoad: src => {
        myOnLoadHandler(src);
    }
>
  Here's some optional content for browsers that don't support XHR or inline
  SVGs. You can use other React components here too. Here, I'll show you.
  <img src="/path/to/myfile.png" />
</SVG>

Props

src string
The SVG file you want to load. It can be an url or a string (base64 or encoded)

wrapper function
A React class or a function that returns a component instance to be used as the wrapper component. Defaults to React.createFactory('span')

preloader node
A component to be shown while the SVG is loading.

cacheGetRequests boolean
A boolean to only request SVGs once. Default is false.

uniquifyIDs boolean
A boolean that create unique IDs for each icon by hashing it. Default is true.

uniqueHash string
A string to use with uniquifyIDs. Default to a random 8 characters string [A-Za-z0-9]

onLoad function
A callback to be invoked upon successful load.
This will receive 2 arguments: the src prop and a isCached boolean

onError function
A callback to be invoked if loading the SVG fails.
This will receive a single argument:

• a xhr RequestError with:

{
    ...,
    isHttpError: bool,
    status: number
}

• or an InlineSVGError, which has the following properties:

{
    name: 'InlineSVGError',
    isSupportedBrowser: bool,
    isConfigurationError: bool,
    isUnsupportedBrowserError: bool,
    message: string
}

Browser Support

Any browsers that support inlining SVGs and XHR will work. The component goes out of its way to handle IE9's weird XHR support so, IE9 and up get your SVG; lesser browsers get the fallback.
We use httpplease for XHR requests.

CORS

If loading SVGs from another domain, you'll need to make sure it allows CORS.

XSS Warning

This component places the loaded file into your DOM, so you need to be careful about XSS attacks. Only load trusted content, and don't use unsanitized user input to generate the src!