HTML still puzzles me

lucianoes

I hate to be a bother, but I am still struggling with my problem, which is now becoming absolutely frustrating:

I am trying to send HTML mail, but instead of a formatted HTML page I am getting plain text full of HTML code. What am I doing wrong? Here is the code I am using:

<?php
$page = file("http://www.geocities.com/wfbrasil/index.html", "r");
if (!$page)
{print "Ooops! Couldn't find the page!"; die;}
else {$content = join("", $page);}
print $content; //so that I see the result in my browser

$header = "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1;\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\nFrom: me@mail.com\nReply-To: me@mail.com\nX-Mailer: PHP mail";
global $content, $header;
mail("test@mail.com", "HTML test", $content, $header);
?>

Thank you,
Luciano ES
Santos - SP - Brasil

lucianoes

...that is what I meant! :-(

    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

vsego

Check my reply here: http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=160237&thread=160234

You might find a solution there (no guarantees, though).

Good luck!

P.S. Please post if you find the solution or not - might be useful to someone else as well.

lucianoes

    Someone else referred me to that site in a private message (which I still haven't duly thanked for). I'd been to that site already in search of a solution to this riddle. I wouldn't post a question here without doing some homework first. That site did not help me at all. What you'll find there is a few painfully long classes that do not make anything clear. I could (or could I?) spot the bits where the message seems to be finally sent, but they didn't give me any clue as to what exactly my code still lacks. Those classes probably work and could do the job for me, but I want to understand the mechanism. On the other hand, I am a newbie and I think that at the current stage of my learning it is not worth digging into all that code trying to understand a whole class in order to figure out how the heck the author managed to send out a decent HTML message. Whatever the trick is, it is buried under a lot of other tricks that I do not want to use right now. Being forced to delve into all that functionality before I get ahold of the basics would be very discouraging.
    But, yes, if I find out about it I will post it here for posterity.

    Thank yous,
    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

mickro

Luciano,

I just tried that code on my server and it seems to work fine. I take it you have received HTML email from other people before? If not check your email program settings to make sure you can recieve HTML email.

Good luck

Mike

vsego

I wouldn't post a question here without doing some homework first.

I apologize. I didn't mean to offend you, but you'd be suprised how many people come here not without "homework", but without even opening PHP manual! Someone here (when pointed to manual) actually asked "What manual?".

To make it up to you, I've searched a bit. Have you seen this article:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/kartic20000807.php3

Good luck!

lucianoes

Eh, no need to apologize, I never took offense. I know just what you mean about people who post their questions here and don't even bother to open the manual, that is exactly why I said that. At any rate, it's a good thing you wrote again, because I get to add one more article to the pileup I have been collecting. Boy, I don't think I'll ever read all that!

I'll read the article you suggested, and also another interesting one I found two days ago but still haven't found the time to read. As soon as I find an answer, I will post it here.

    Thank you,
    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

lucianoes

It works correctly with your server? Oh, boy... Sure, my e-mail program can handle HTML messages. Every day, a handful of spammers insist on annoying me with pointless junk that I will never care to read.

Anyways, that puts the problem under a new perspective. Something is likely to be wrong with my setup. I am going to upload the code to the remote server that hosts my site and see if the code works from their server. Yeah, I know, perhaps I should've done that before, but I never had problems with my local setup before.

The funny thing is that I am not so interested in sending HTML mail myself. I hate HTML mail! I'm just worried I posted that code in reply to someone in the forum and, when I tested it, I found it did not work. The person never complained, maybe because it worked for him. But it didn't work for me, and now I want to sort that out, damn it!

    Thank you,
    Luciano ES
    Santos - SP - Brasil

lucianoes

Hello, folks.
If anyone still gets to read this thread, I'd like to tell you that I found out why my script wasn't working. The following line was missing ni my header:

MIME-Version: 1.0

And that is it. Now it works fine.

Happy coding!
Luciano ES
Santos - SP - Brasil