I need to rewrite all the files in a directory and essentially make their extentions css instead of php. I want to do with with a .htaccess file within that specific directory.
What is the correct method of doing so and are there any special PHP headers I need to set the ensure the file is read as a .css file correctly?
I think that you rather want requests of *.css to be rewritten internaly to *.php. So try this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(foo/.*)\.css$ $1.php [L]
While foo is here the specific directory.
You now should explicitly declare the output as text/css using the following at the begin of the PHP script:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/css;charset=<your charset>');
Replace <your charset> by whatever charset/encoding you are using (probably ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8).
well they don't need a css extension if your just using them from with in your site. They just need to output the header Content-Type: text/css before rendering (I assume) the generated css. Similar sort of thing applies to other file types, if you have a php script that generates an image, you'd do it the same way, except you change the content type to image/png or jpeg or whatever.
However, if you want the outside would to see these generated css files as files with a css extension then mix what I've said with what Gumbo said.