[RESOLVED] Textareas and word wraping in emails

Dawg

Why does the formating you do in a text area get lost when sending the input in an email??

Here is my Page.

ANd here is what I input:
Dave T
email address
Phone number

Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing
Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing

And here is whad I get
Dave T email address Phone number Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing Testing

You can safetly test it and you will receive an email copy at the address you input

Houdini

Because it is plain text and not html and you are probably sending your textarea as such, what exactly do you really want it to do?

bradgrafelman

Because you're sending out HTML e-mails, but not converting line breaks into the HTML <br> character.

Look at using the [man]nl2br/man function.

Dawg

The nl2br() function works great.

But I thought I was sending either a text or html email here is my standard mail code

//Send Mail 
function send_mail($Mailto, $Subject, $Comments, $From)
	{
		$headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n"; 
		$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n"; 
		$headers .= "From: ".$From. "\r\n";
		$Mailsent = @mail($Mailto,  $Subject, $Comments , $headers);
		return $Mailsent;
	}

This code only sends html mail??

One of the other issues is that the <textarea> does not word wrap in FIrefox but does in IE and Opera. I have posted over in the Mozilla forums on this but any thoughts would be great.

Thanks

bradgrafelman

I ran into this issue with FireFox before, and I forgot the suggested CSS "hack" to work around it.

At any rate, that wordwrapping is only visual and will not affect how the actual message looks. If you truly want your message to "wrap", you'll have to use a function like [man]wordwrap/man and use the HTML <br> entity as your break string.

Dawg wrote:
But I thought I was sending either a text or html email...

What do you mean "either a text or html" ? You mean both? The only way you can send different content types in one message is to create a multipart e-mail. As it is, you simply send out one content header, as such the entire e-mail is HTML. For more information, here[/URL is an article I found on a quick Google search.

If you're confused about the "text/html" bit, you need to realize that the first part (before the slash) is more like a general category, and the second bit (after the slash) just specifies exactly which type within that category you're using. Normal text (such as in a .txt file) has a content type of text/plain. Another example of a different type of "text" is CSS style code, which has a content type of text/css.

halojoy

<textarea> has got several ways to wrap

for example you can turn off wrapping:
<textarea name="userInput" cols="36" rows="5" wrap="off"></textarea>

Textarea Wrap Behaviour ...

This tutorial includes 'try it for yourself' tests that are designed to help you understand the behaviour of the different 'wrap' attributes that can be used in the HTML Textarea Tag. These tests enable you to see how text is displayed on a form's Textarea input box and also enable you to see what is sent to the web server.

Link to HTML Textarea Wrap Tutorial:
http://www.web-wise-wizard.com/html-tutorials/html-form-forms-textarea-wrap.html

wrap="xxxxx" can be one of the following:
Attribute for <TEXTAREA ...>
WRAP = SOFT | HARD | OFF
http://www.idocs.com/tags/forms/_TEXTAREA_WRAP.html
.

Dawg

I was told that the wrap attribute is no longer valid.

Dawg

I thought that I found a bug in FireFox (haha funny me), on their forums they said it is my source code that is most likely the problem with my textarea not word wrapping when viewed in Fire FOx. It wraps fine in IE and Opera.

Can anyone see something that is wrong with this? There are two <textarea>'s toward the bottom of the page.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/sa_article_page.dwt.php" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Title" -->
<title>Submit your free < $1000 ad</title>
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
<link href="../css/page_layout.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="../css/SA_CSS.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="../php/functions_js.js" type="text/javascript" />

</head>

<body>

<div id="wrapper">
	<div id="header">
		<?PHP
			include("page_header.php");
		?>
	</div>
	<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Body" -->
		<div id="content1colArticle">
			<table width="800" align="center">
				<tr>
				  <td><p align="center"><font color="#003399" size="5" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Submit you free gear ad</font>.</p>
				  <? if (isset($msg)) {echo $msg;}?>
	                <form action="<? echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="gear" id="gear">
	                  <table width="503" cellpadding="5">
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Your Name:</font></td>
                          <td align="left" valign="top"><input name="user_name" type="text" id="user_name" size="50" maxlength="50"
value="<? if(isset($_POST['user_name'])) echo $_POST['user_name']; ?>"/></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Your email:<br />
                              <font color="#CC0000" size="2">Where you will receive a copy of
                          this ad.                       </font></font></td>
                          <td align="left" valign="top"><input name="contact_email" type="text" id="contact_email" size="50" maxlength="50" value="<? if(isset($_POST['contact_email'])) echo $_POST['contact_email']; ?>"/></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" size="3" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Ad Descripton:<br />
                          <font color="#CC0000" size="2">500 max characters<br />
                          If you want to start a new paragraph make sure to hit
                          enter. </font> </font></td>
                          <td width="333" align="left" valign="top"><textarea name="description" cols="50" rows="10" id="description"><? if(isset($_POST['description'])) echo $_POST['description']; ?></textarea>
                          </td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" size="3" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Price:<br />
                          <font color="#CC0000" size="2">$1,000 or less </font></font></td>
                          <td align="left" valign="top"><strong><font color="#CC0000">$</font></strong>
                          <input name="price" type="text" id="price" value="<? if(isset($_POST['price'])) echo $_POST['price']; ?>" size="20" maxlength="20" /></td>
                        </tr>
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" size="3" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Ad
                              Contact:<br />
                          <font color="#CC0000" size="2">Name<br />
                          Email<br />
                          Phone </font></font></td>
                          <td align="left" valign="top"><textarea name="contact" cols="30" rows="4" id="contact"><? if(isset($_POST['contact'])) echo $_POST['contact']; ?></textarea></td>
                        </tr>
                      <!--  <tr>
                          <td align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Photo:</font></td>
                          <td><input name="photo" type="file" id="photo" size="40" />
                              <br />
                              <font color="#003399" size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#CC0000">100k
                              limit, Perfer 800w x 600h images</font></font></td>
                        </tr> -->
                        <tr>
                          <td width="150" align="right" valign="top"><font color="#003399" size="3" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Submit:</font></td>
                          <td align="left" valign="top"><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" /></td>
                        </tr>
                      </table>
	                  <p>&nbsp;                      </p>
	                  <p>&nbsp;</p>
                  </form>			        <p>&nbsp; </p></td>
				</tr>
			</table>
		</div>
  <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
	<div id="footer">				
	<?PHP
		include("page_footer.php");
	?>
	</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</div>

</body><!-- InstanceEnd -->
</html>

Thanks

bradgrafelman

The problem indeed lies in the way FireFox renders textarea's and wraps the text.

IIRC, if you enter a long string of characters unbroken by spaces, i.e. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" (etc.), FireFox does not wrap that line. If you insert spaces and line breaks, however, it will start to wrap properly.

Dawg

Thank you. I wonder why they did not say so over at the mozilla forums