Child theme enqueuing with dependencies - php

Question

I'm trying to create a child theme. The parent theme has a style.css and all, and I was looking at wp_enqueue_style() function, and it says that you can inlude dependencies. So that means that the themes own style.css can be active, and in my child theme if I specify the same rule in my style.css, it should overwrite it.
But the dependency is an array of handles. How do I find those handles?
wp_enqueue_style( 'mytheme-style', get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/style.css', array('main_css') );
I tried with the above, but it only loads the style.css from child theme, not the parent.
Where can I find these handles?
EDIT:
I found the code for reproducing the handles and scripts:
function wpa54064_inspect_scripts() {
global $wp_scripts;
foreach( $wp_scripts->queue as $handle ) :
echo $handle,' ';
endforeach;
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'wpa54064_inspect_scripts' );
function wpa54064_inspect_style() {
global $wp_styles;
foreach( $wp_styles->queue as $handle ) :
echo $handle,' ';
endforeach;
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'wpa54064_inspect_style' );
But it still doesn't work the way I thought it does.

Answer 1

get_stylesheet_directory_uri() will return the child themes URL if active.
Since you're trying to load the style.css file inside your parent theme you can use get_template_directory_uri() instead.
E.g:
wp_enqueue_style( 'mytheme-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css', array('main_css') );
My suggestion would be to load your stylesheets like this (code goes inside your child theme's functions.php):
function wpse_load_styles() {
wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-styles', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );
wp_enqueue_style( 'mytheme', get_stylesheet_uri(), array( 'parent-styles' ) );
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpse_load_styles' );