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Sass: Referencing Parent Selectors

You can select the parent selector by using the & character. It tells where the parent selector should be inserted.

Example​

Example of parent selectors in a SCSS file:

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Referencing Parent Selectors</title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/css/bootstrap.min.css">
      <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
      <script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
   </head>

   <body>
      <div class="container">
         <h1>Example using Parent Selector</h1>
         <a href="http://www.example.com/"> www.example.com </a>
      </div>
   </body>
</html>

and the style.scss file:

a {
   font-size: 20px;
   &:hover { background-color: yellow; }
}

Then you tell Sass to watch the file and update the CSS when the file changes:

sass --watch my\path\style.scss:style.css

The generated style.css files is as shown below:

a {
   font-size: 20px;
}

a:hover {
   background-color: yellow;
}

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