"Invalid declaration" error when import has semicolon

[NoahStahl]

What version of Tailwind CSS are you using?

v4.0.3

What build tool (or framework if it abstracts the build tool) are you using?

@tailwindcss/cli 4.0.3

What version of Node.js are you using?

v22.13.1

What browser are you using?

Chrome

What operating system are you using?

Windows

Describe your issue

Following the installation instructions docs for CLI, step two is to create a css file with content:

@import "tailwindcss";

When I do this an run the build command in step 3, it fails with error:

Error: Invalid declaration: `@import "tailwindcss"`

However, when I remove the semicolon on the import line, build succeeds. This avoids the error:

@import "tailwindcss"

** Expected behavior **

The semicolon should be optional, or the CLI should not fail when it is provided as documented.

[wongjn]

Consider checking if your input CSS file has been encoded as UTF-8 with BOM. If so, try resaving it with encoding UTF-8.

[NoahStahl]

Thanks for reply. Yes, my source file is encoded UTF-8 with BOM, and changing to UTF-8 prevents the error. I'd hope this would be considered a bug, and Tailwind would not fail on this. At the very least, the error should tell you it refuses to work with BOM encoding?

My files in v3 have always been BOM encoded, never had any trouble.