Question about PHP's email abilities

[Sok]

I am creating a page where there would be colums and on the end of the colums a field where you could type things. Point would be to get the page to send the field's info and the column before it to an email adress.

Now with html, i've heard this would be a work of great pain and misery with lots of time wasted, as with php, this should be a piece of cake.

Could someone englight me on this matter a bit, so I could get a hang of what to add to the html script.

[laserlight]

basically, you want to submit form data to an email address?

There are a few ways in which PHP can help.
You could take a look at [man]mail/man, though it isnt very reliable.

[Sok]

Why is the mail not too reliable?

And is there any other way you know this could be done. I don't care about the sender or anything like that, simply to get the page to send the info inside the fields and the columns before it (this is coming for a company, little like a shopping cart, but straight info to the email, all products on one page etc, you get the point).

[Sok]

And now that I think of this, could it be easier if the page would first gather the info that it should send to a new page (like the amounts that have been inserted and the product info before them). And after clicking "submit" there, it would just grab all the info on that page and send it to the email?

[programmer79]

Here is some code that should get you started. Let me know if you have any questions.

<?
$to_email = "[e-mail]";

if (!isset($_POST['user_form'])){?>
       <form method="post" action="<?=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']?>">
       USER NAME:  <INPUT TYPE="TEXT"  name="user_name"> <br>
       USER PHONE: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT"  name="user_phone"> <br>
       USER STATE: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT"  name="user_state"> <br>
       <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT"  name="user_form">
       </form>
<? }
else{
    $message = "The following information was submitted <br>";
    $message .=  "user name: " . $_POST['user_name'] . "<br>";
    $message .=  "user phone: " . $_POST['user_phone'] . "<br>";
    $message .=  "user state: " . $_POST['user_state'] . "<br>";

mail($to_email,"New user information",$message);

echo $message;
}?>

[rgermain]

The only thing I can see wrong with your code programmer79 is that in the message you use <BR> tags, which is fine for outputing to a browser window, but it might get a little messy when it comes in email. I would also recommend to clean it up that change the <BR> tags to \n. Then when outputing them to the browser window just use:

echo nl2br($message);

That way you get clean output in both the email and browser.

[programmer79]

rgermain --

You are correct with the <br> tags. As long as the email accepts html <br> should be ok, but you can never be sure. Thank you for the correction.