Is there a way to load an alternate stylesheet using PHP?

Question

I'm building a mobile version of my site, and at this point, creating an alternate stylesheet would suffice to make the site adept for mobile devices. I want to use a user agent detection PHP script to detect the platform, and switch stylesheets accordingly. Is there any way to do that?

See this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3817155/php-mobile-browser-detection Then just have an if/else statement echoing the HTML code used to call the stylesheet. — Palladium, Jun 29 '12 at 03:21
That's good, but the part I'm having trouble with is swapping stylesheets. — Jules, Jun 29 '12 at 03:23
Why not use [CSS media queries](http://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/) and style to the screen size, not the user agent — Phil, Jun 29 '12 at 03:28

Baz1nga · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-29T04:49:50.427

3

You might want to try out a librabry to check if its a mobile device then you can try out this library: http://code.google.com/p/php-mobile-detect/ (this also supports detecting specific OSes)

and then have code like

if($detect->isiOS()){
    echo <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iOSstyle.css" />;
}
else if ($detect->isMobile()) {
   echo <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mobile.css" />;
}
else{
  echo <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="normal.css" />;
}

FYI, these libraries are dependent on the User-Agent value in the header and other headers too.

edited Jun 29 '12 at 04:49

answered Jun 29 '12 at 03:32

Baz1nga

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I tried using it to replace my current stylesheet link (before moving on to developing the mobile site, just to be safe); I get a PHP syntax error at ` – Jules Jun 29 '12 at 04:21
sorry my daily dealing with asp.net just overpowers other language syntax. – Baz1nga Jun 29 '12 at 04:52

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 29 '12 at 03:31

Try this (if-condition written in pseudocode because I haven't used WURLF):

<?php
if (device is mobile) {
    echo "<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='mobile.css' />";
}else{
    echo "<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='monitor.css' />";
?>

Put this code where you'd normally have the CSS link.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 29 '12 at 03:32

What I've done before is store the current state (mobile/desktop) in a session variable. Then you can have a "View Desktop/Mobile Version" link which would toggle the session variable. When you render each page, use an if statement on the session variable to determine which stylesheet to display. I recommend you separate this logic into a function for re-use so you don't have to edit 20 different pages when refactoring.

If you want to auto-detect mobile browsers, you can use WURLF or php-mobile-detect.

Is there a way to load an alternate stylesheet using PHP?

3 Answers3