Receiving data from form in html format email

talbot2 · March 18th, 2009, 09:42 AM

I'm using a form on my web site to send information to me via and e-mail. Everything works fine. However I would like the info to arrive within an HTML table in the e-mail so as to set it up in columns . Is it possible to do this and if so can you point me to a source for this information. Thank-you for your help. T

Greg Griffiths · March 18th, 2009, 03:10 PM

Can you provide more detail on how the form is sent to you, for example are you using the following approach :

Code:

<form action="mailto:admin@example.com" enctype="text/plain" method="post">

or is the data being sent via a POST / GET method to a PHP script for processing ?

If it is the latter then you should be able to use something like http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php which has an example of sending mail in a HTML format.

talbot2 · March 19th, 2009, 07:21 AM

Hi Greg, Thank-you for responding.

The data is being sent by POST to a PHP script for processing.
It's the usual Name, address, email etc. I did look at http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php and saw

$message = '
<html>
<head>
<title>Birthday Reminders for August</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Here are the birthdays upcoming in August!</p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Person</th><th>Day</th><th>Month</th><th>Year</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Joe</td><td>3rd</td><td>August</td><td>1970</td>
etc.

That's just what I want but how do I get the data from the form into the <td> </td>s

$message .= 'Name: '.$_POST['name']."\n\n";
$message .= 'Address: '.$_POST['address1']."\n\n";
$message .= 'Address: '.$_POST['address2']."\n\n";
$message .= 'City: '.$_POST['city']."\n\n";
etc.

Thank-you again for your time. Talbot

anees_muhd · March 23rd, 2009, 12:13 AM

While Generating the $message Variable (from your example code)
you can concatenate your POSTed values into the string. SO that we can receive it as you deserved

for eg:

$message = '<table>
<tr>
<td colspan=2>Contact Information</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Name:</td>
<td>'.$_POST['name'].'</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Address1:</td>
<td>'.$_POST['address1'].'</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Address2:</td>
<td>'.$_POST['address2'].'</td>
</tr>
</table>'

Regards
Anees

talbot2 · March 23rd, 2009, 05:05 PM

Hi Anees,
Thank-you for your reply.
I did as you suggested and when I received the e-mail the data from the variable was there. However all the html code was there as well, see below:

Code:

<table>
<tr>
<td colspan=2>Contact Information</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Name:</td>
<td>Peter Rawlins</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Address:</td>
<td>205 Somerset</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>City:</td>
<td>Oshawa</td>
</tr>

etc.

Is there anyway around this now? Thank-agin for your help. T

anees_muhd · March 23rd, 2009, 11:44 PM

It is just because you sent the e mail as text(default)
To receive HTML emails you need to set header Content-type as HTML
and also the MIME-Version

PHP Code:


			
<?php 
mail('recipient@some.net', 'Subject', 
     '<html><body><p>Your <i>message</i> here.</p></body></html>', 
     "To: The Receiver <recipient@some.net>\n" . 
     "From: The Sender <sender@some.net>\n" . 
     "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" . 
     "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"); 
?>

Regards
Anees

talbot2 · March 24th, 2009, 10:54 AM

Thank-you very much Anees, it works perfectly now.
All the best. T