Automatically Grab CSS Variables?

[e_covert]

Is there a way in php (other than reading through the actual .css file) to retrieve the css variables from an external style sheet?
I want to make a style class that will only be called if I plan on overriding anything in the main style.css file. However, when I instantiate that class, I want it to set the values of the .css as it's (the classes)default values. Short of reading through the file and breaking up the strings, is there a way to access these variables directly?
If reading through the file is the only way to accomplish this, does anyone have any comments on the performance hit I might sustain by opening and reading a file? If the hit will be negligible I'll just go ahead that way. Keep in mind that I will only instantiate the style class if I need to override the defaults.

[pnoeric]

i think you can only read the file-- this is less a php thing and more of an html thing, and html doesn't have a mechanism to read itself. well, there might ebe some way to do this in javascript but i promise it won't be fun ;-) as screwy as it sounds you will probably have an easier time of it just reading/parsing the css file yourself.

i can't speak for performance hits but for casual use it won't be noticable. you could also cache the results of reading it, which will help if it is used regularly.

hope this helps

best
eric