Data merging

[Anon]

Greetings to all you PHP Gurus,

I'm stuck and need your help. Here is my problem.

What I have is a database of names and email addresses, and other personal user information for one of my sites. And what I have is a mail out script, before this I have always just send out a non personlized version of the newsletter, now I want to add person information.

What I have is a form, where I have the fields of SUBJECT and BODY, and what I would like to do is enter something like

Hi <FirstName>,

Your Order number is <OrderNumber>.
Your Phone Number is <PhoneNumber>

My regular script works fine without personalization, all I would like to know how to do is have PHP replace the <variable> for each value in the database or to put it easier, how do replace the <variable> with database contents in form of a loop.

Any help will be apreciated.

Thanks,

Andy

[lawnmowerman]

If you read your form letter into a variable (using file() and join(), for example) named $line, you can use the following code to do replacement:

<?php
$line = str_replace( "<FirstName>", $fname, $line );
$line = str_replace( "<LastName>", $lname, $line );
$line = str_replace( "<PhoneNumber>", $phone, $line );

etc etc etc

?>

I doubt this is the most efficient way of doing this, but it works just fine for me.

-Rich

[brandonschnell]

i store the templates in a database using simple vars like $first_name, then load it from the database (or file) into a string. eval the string using:

eval("\$data = \"$data\";");

this will replace the vars with the correct data. however eval handles the $data string as php code which is a security issue.

so we've got:

#########################################
$data = loaddata();

for (each user)
{
$first_name = fetch_first_name(from_user);

 $last_name = fetch_last_name(from_user);

 eval("\$data = \"$data\";");

 mail("$email_address", "A newsletter for $first_name $last_name", "$data");
 }