Format Text Area using mail( ) 2

[Muppsy007]

Hi all,

I have a contact page where people can email me by filling out a form, including a large text area which contains the actual message. This page is contact.php

When the user submits, the form action takes them to contact_confirm.php which has a thankyou message and includes a simple script called gen_email.php.

gen_email.php simply populates variables with the form elements from contact.php and sends them via the mail() function.

When I get the email, all is fine, except all carriage returns the user entered in the message text area are ommited, so the message just appears as a continuous paragraph. It also has trouble with some characters like ', making them appear as /'.

Is there any way of fixing this before the mail is sent?

Thanks in advance

 

[sleipnir214]

To get rid of the slashes, see stripslashes().

With the missing returns from the textarea tag, you could either use wordwrap(). You might also look at setting the textarea's "wrap" attribute to "physical".



Want the best answers? Ask the best questions!

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[jwoods7]

It sounds like something is happening to the new line characters...

In text boxes, a new line is \r\n

Ensure that nothing is changing the message before it's submitted. For example, try

$message = str_replace("\r\n","NEW LINE",$message);

then print that on the screen. If those marks aren't there...you won't see any 'NEW LINE' comments, thus you know something is removing them.

When I have my textboxes create email, I don't have wrap or anything...

<textarea name=message>write your message</textarea>

then on the mail page:

$message = $_POST['message']; // or $_GET['message'];
mail($to,$subject,$message);

If it's that simple, the new lines should show up.

Try posting your code here, we can take a look

 

[Muppsy007]

Thanks alot guys.

JWOODS7, your little string replace tip made me come across the conclusion. The new lines were definately still getting through (as they were replaced by "NEW LINE").

The thing was I was trying to send the message in HTML format, making \r\n obsolete I guess.

So I just modified your code to read:
$message = str_replace("\r\n","<BR>",$message);

And all is well!

Thanks again
Aaron