Automatic Email to Birthday

[uuzuka]

Hi,

does anybody have a clue or source? I am trying to figure out a php-script that checks a simple textfile which includes birthday, name etc. and if the current date is same to a bithday than it picks up the emailadress of the person and send her an (personalized) birthday-email.
But my weak php experiences make my goal being far away.

Your help is appreciated.

uuz

[cahva]

Ok. Lets say that you have a textfile in a form like this:

1979-05-12|Jack Slater|[e-mail]
1979-04-03|John Doe|[e-mail]

(year-month-day|name|email)

In the script we go throught the file line by line and when the right date is found, send the email to the email in that row and put the name in the message.

<?php
$f=file('birthday.txt');
$today=date('m-d');

for($i=0;$i<count($f);$i++) {
	$info=explode ('|',$f[$i]);
	if (substr($info[0],5)==$today) {
		$message='Happy birthday '.$info[1].'!';
		sendmail('[e-mail]',$info[2],'Happy Birthday!',$message);
}
}

function sendmail($from,$to,$subject,$message) {
$headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From:".$from."\n";

mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
}
?>

[trexx]

it takes a bit more than just a PHP script to do something like that. a PHP script only runs when someone calls the script (normally when you call the URL of that script in your browser).

but what you need is a mechanism that calls your script every day, to a specified time. on linux/unix systems you have cronjobs to do that.
you could trigger the lynx browser in order to start your script. or with PHP > 4.3 just use the command-line version.

[uuzuka]

Hi,

chva, I will try to get the script working. This will take some time..😃 .
But at first i want to thank you so so so much. As its working fine i will let you know.

Indeed there is the problem with the starting issue and i wil ask the webspace admin to create a cron job.

Lets see when it'll work.

uuz