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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T20:20:49+00:00

Does anybody know of an automated way of telling whether a PHP script is

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Does anybody know of an automated way of telling whether a PHP script is being called directly (as a HTML page), or as a JavaScript, or as a CSS Stylesheet?

Without GET variables, or setting a flag in the file ( that is what I am doing right now).

Just curious.

EDIT: Some background because it was asked for in answers: The reason why I want this is a framework that I use when serving HTML pages as well as when serving CSS files. This frameweork has a custom error handler. When I’m in JS “mode”, I would like to throw errors as a JS alert(). When I’m in CSS mode, maybe a red body background or something. I would like to avoid working with flags (?mode=css) or constant definitions for the sake of code cleanness, but several answerers have confirmed that there is no “magic” way of finding out what a resource is being used for.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If I understand you correctly, you have a page which calls itself, (like this):

    <?php // page.php
if (is_called_as_js()) {
    header('Content-Type: text/javascript;charset=utf-8');
    echo "alert('hello');";
    exit;
} elseif (is_called_as_css()) {
    header('Content-Type: text/css');
    echo 'body { color: green }';
    exit;
}
?>
<html>
(...)
<script src="page.php"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="page.php" />

    In that case, no, there’s no way to tell – the browser sends a request saying GET /page.php. No intent is mentioned – just “give me the page and the browser will decide what to do with it”. (yeah, yeah, there is Accept and whatnot, haven’t seen a modern browser actually using this feature to say “give me this page as CSS”, most just say Accept: */*)

    If you insist that all your output, be it JS, CSS, or HTML, should be generated with one file, I suggest an URL rewriter (assuming Apache HTTP server, this would be mod_rewrite; most platforms offer this functionality in some way or another). Example using mod_rewrite:

    # .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^css/(.*) /page.php?type=css&file=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^js/(.*) /page.php?type=js&file=$1 [L]

    This way, request to /css/style.css will look like page.php?type=css&file=style.css when your script is run, similarly for /js/foobar.js.

    (Technically, you’re still using GET variables to find out if the result is supposed to be HTML,JS,or CSS; but it’s not visible to the users, plus you get around some older browsers’ limitation “if query string, don’t cache or cache brokenly”)

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