CSS and Regular expressions

[ruslan]

I am working on a "control panel" that lets a user editi his site apearance (edit his css file) like the one used in windows that let's y edit your windows apearance. This involves a lot a of JavaScript on client side(already done) and a PHP script that is capabel or reading/writing a css file (extract some values from it and writing them back). The easyest way of doing this i could come up with was reading the entire css file in a string variable then looking for the particulat values with ereg() and (when modifying the file, the same way was used).
The problem I am faceing is writeing the apropriat regular expresions for finding the values. Here is an example of what i did but i doubt that it's a good one
i have something like this:

.top_menu {background: #FFFFFF;}

and i want to retrive #FFFFFF;

and here is the regexp:
.top_menu[^{{]{[b]background[:]🙁[;]);[}]*}}

It's not a strong one but it's working.
I can't figure out a regexp for replacing in the same string #FFFFFFF with (let's say) #000000
Please help.
PS: then again, maybe someone can sugest another way of compliting this task without regexp
([e-mail])

[theeper]

I would use variables in place of all the values you need to change, then include the variables file into the CSS file.

----- Make a script to write all your variables/values to a file from an HTML form. Include the variable file so you can see the current values. -------

<?
include 'variables.php';

if ($update == "yes") {
    $text = "<?php\n";
    $text .= "\$bg_color = \""."$new_bg_color"."\";\n";
    $text .= "\$text_color = \""."$new_text_color"."\";\n";
    $text .= "?>";
    $filename = "variables.php";
    $file = fopen($filename, "w");
    fputs($file, $text);
    fclose($file);
}
?>

<FORM ACTION='<?=$PHP_SELF; ?>' METHOD='post'>
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME='update' VALUE='yes'>
<INPUT TYPE=text NAME='new_bg_color' VALUE=<?=$bg_color; ?>'>
<INPUT TYPE=text NAME='new_text_color' VALUE=<?=$text_color; ?>'>
<INPUT TYPE=submit>
</FORM>

------ Your variable file would look something like this after updating ------

<?
bg_color = "FFFFFF";
$text_color = "000000";
?>

Then in your CSS file have something like this.

include 'variables.php';

.top_menu {background: #<?=$bg_color; ?>;}
.text {background: #<?=$text_color; ?>;}

This way, you can avoid REGEX totally. I hope this makes sense.

[shu]

I implemented my version of user-specific "skin" on our site using a dynamic css file! We have a file called gencss.php, and is linked using:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/scripts/gencss.php?userID=<? echo $uid; ?>" type="text/css">,

then in turn, the gencss.php would generate the REAL style sheet base on the preferences of that user, identified by $uid. The user preferences can be in a plain file or in the database, which is more convenient.