Dynamic Content and Emails

[Anon]

I am generating reports from a DB. I have been able to successfully create a php page to show the results.
What I am looking to do know is to be able to automatically send my boss a copy of these reports daily.(I'm lazy)
I have been playing with sending an email using php. I've been successful doing this with static content.
I have not yet figured out how to send the email with the dynamic content.
Essentially what I am doing is running 10 queries against the DB(reports contain several ECHO statments) and I want to insert the results into the body of the email.

The report functions are like so:
function pull_QA($rpt_id,$number) {
$result=mysql_query("SELECT ans1,ans2,ans3,ans4,ans5 FROM rpt WHERE qid=$rpt_id;")
or die (mysql_error());
IF($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo(display_report($number,$data[ans1],$data[ans2],$data[ans3],$data[ans4],$data[ans5]));
}
}

function display_rpt($number,$a1,$a2,$a3,$a4,$a5)
{
echo "<tr><td><strong>Results were</strong</td></tr>";

echo"<tr><td>$a1</td></tr>";
echo"<tr><td>$a2</td></tr>";
echo"<tr><td>$a3</td></tr>";
echo"<tr><td>$a4</td></tr>";
echo"<tr><td>$a5</td></tr>";
echo "<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>";
return;

What I have done so far is to run the queries like so:

$rpt_number = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$rpt1=display_rpt(1,1);
$header='Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1';
$mail_to='$[e-mail]';
$mail_subject="weekly reports';

mail($mail_to,$mail_subject;$rp1,$header.)

What is happening is that the report is being pulled and echo'd to the screen rather than being inserted into the variable $rpt1. What can I do to make this do what I want it to do?
I had the idea to insert each row in the function into an array, but I was hoping there would be a more elegant way of doing this.

Bryan

[tmaguir]

This is how I usually send emails with data from databases. I use postgresql so this will be a little different but the concept is the same.

$q = "select * from table";
$r = pg_exec($connection, $q);
$body = "Search reults are:\n";
for($i=0;$i<pg_numrows($r);$i++){
$row = pg_fetch_array($r,$i);
$body .= "$row[0], $row[1]...$row[n]\n";
}

I use plain generic text, I am not a big fan of html emails.

[techek]

I won't be babbeling about everything and nothing this time, but I must admit I think you've missed something at the PHP-basics.

You're so close to solving your problem. Here's the changes I'd make to your script :

function display_rpt($number,$a1,$a2,$a3,$a4,$a5) {
$output .= "<tr><td><strong>Results were</strong</td></tr>";

$output .= "<tr><td>$a1</td></tr>";
$output .= "<tr><td>$a2</td></tr>";
$output .= "<tr><td>$a3</td></tr>";
$output .= "<tr><td>$a4</td></tr>";
$output .= "<tr><td>$a5</td></tr>";
$output .= "<tr><td> </td></tr>";
return $output;
}

As simple as that. You might want to check out the possibilities with functions and strings later on. It can save you a lot of trouble AND open your eyes for other nifty things to be made in PHP. YEAH!!! =8-)

[reagent]

bryan,
what would make this easier is to use the output buffering functions that php has.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.outcontrol.php

so in effect, you can capture the output before it is displayed to the browser and assign it to a string. I'm doing that now for the same type of application and it works beautifully.

<?php
ob_start();

echo "Hello World\n";
$strOutput = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
?>

after this,
"Hello World" will be stored in $strOutput, and nothing will be output to the page.

hth.
p.