How to format the output of a form.

martinbej

Hello,

i am using a simple contact.php form to gather info from online users (from the contact.html) on my website.

I am trying to format the output of each field as it looks in the contact form (the contact.html, which delivers to contact.php), but the results (which are then delivered to my email address) in fact will come to my inbox cluttered, and each field result stands next to each other which makes it hard to distinguish and read the results.

I've tried different ways, but it seems i am unable to format the output results, i only get the results.

Any help would be appreciated.

Martin

bpat1434

Do you have code you'd like to show us, or are we to guess at what you're using?

martinbej

Thanks Bpat,

So, i am posting here only the contact.php file, which gets data form the contact.htm ( i am not posting this at it is obvious that this file uses action="contact.php" nad i get correct results)

Here is contact.php form

<body>
<?php
$EmailFrom = "martinbej@hotmail.com";
$EmailTo = "martinbej@yahoo.com";
$FamilyName=Trim(stripslashes($POST['FamilyName']));
$FirstNames = Trim(stripslashes($POST['FirstNames']));
$Dob = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Dob']));
$Nationality = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Nationality']));
$Institution1 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Institution1']));
$Institution2 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Institution2']));
$Institution3 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Institution3']));
$Degree1 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Degree1']));
$Degree2 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Degree2']));
$Degree3 = Trim(stripslashes($POST['Degree3']));

$validationOK=true;
if (!$validationOK) {
print "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;URL=error.htm\">";
exit;
}
?>

<?php
$success = mail($EmailTo, $Subject, $Body, "From: <$EmailFrom>");

if ($success){
print "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;URL=ok.htm\">";
}
else{
print "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;URL=error.htm\">";
}
?>
</body>

I tried different table tachniques, but not a chance, all i get in my email is a sentence of the results from the contact.php! I all new at PHP so . .

thnx,

Martin

future448

Two things:

If you want to send your email as html then you need to tell the email client that you are sending it as html by adding it to the headers.
Your not including the html in your $Body variable but just outputting it to the page.

So for example to start you off:

$Body = '<table width="450" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td height="30" colspan="2" class="style2">Personal Data</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="50" colspan="2" class="style1"><strong>' . $FamilyName . '</strong><br />';

It may be simpler to just send a plain text email if you are only interested in getting the data, so something like this:

$Body = "Family Name: $FamilyName \n";
$Body .= "First Names: $FirstNames \n";

I just did a quick yahoo search and found this tutorial which seems to give you all the info you will need.

bpat1434

Alternatively you can look at SwiftMailer or HTMLMimeMail as a pre-built SMTP/mail/sendmail library that will handle all this MIME encoding stuff for you 😉

martinbej

Thanks,

future448, bpat1434, i ended up figuring it out by including in the headers the html extension, and by simply inlcuding html code inside the php file (inside"
$message = <<<EOF
<HTML>
.
.

.
</HTML>
EOF;

I tried to download swiftmailer, but somehow wasn't able to download it. Anyhow since i am hosting my website on an online server, and not having my on own server running (with .php and apache/sendmail etc. installed) i would not have been able to deal with either Swiftmailer or MimeHTML.

Thanks again for the indications and the help

Martin