Help - Fetch_Body Trouble - PHPBuilder Forums

Help - Fetch_Body Trouble

teamtravis

I am trying to process email via PHP and am having some issues with the imap_fetchbody function. When I read the body contents, its not reading the new line characters. So the Use Case is...
1. Send email to account via Outlook with line breaks
2. Run PHP page to read and display email.
3. Page displays the contents of the body, sans the new line characters.

What am I missing??

Roger_Ramjet

What you are forgetting is that html knows nothing about newlines, be they unix or winders. What you have to do is use nl2br

teamtravis

Holy genius, batman! Thanks, I'll try that.

teamtravis

Next question. Its showing the line breaks (obviously), but now the text has a width limit and starts its own word wrap. Any ideas on how to fix that?

Roger_Ramjet

Well the standard line length for email text is 70 (or 72 I forget which) chars so that is what you are getting newlines on. If you don't want that then use PREG_REPLACE.

First of all you need to replace all double newlines with tags to maintain your paragraphs. Actually what you have to do is to replace with , then add a to the beginning and a to the end.

Then just strip out all the newlines that remain and leave it to the browser to determine the word wrap. Personally I would use css to justify the text and make it look really pretty.

teamtravis

I thought about that, but when sending emails in HTML format in outlook, outlook automatically generates the appropriate css and adds it to the html in the email. Doesnt look like php is pulling any of that though (in fact its stripping out the div tags out of the email), just the email text. How can I pull the exact contents, css and all, out of the email?

Roger_Ramjet

Well, when you create an html email in eg Outlook, you actually set the IMAP.htmlBody as well as other IMAP header properties for encoding the html. Normal email Body is always ASCI plain text. What you are getting when you get the Body is the text with all tags stripped out. The html will actually be contained in a MIME or Base64 encoded attachment somewhere in the message which is reconstructed by email client on reception. Use imap_fetchstructure to find out what is in the multi-part message and then various other functions to fetch and decode the bit you want.

PS The css generated by Outlook is appalling and can cause problems in other client and web emails.

teamtravis

I've read the documentation on imap_fetchstructure, but its not nearly as useful as other documentation on php.net, and I'm struggling a little on exactly the best way to use it, especially to get a hold of the full message. I know the css from outlook sucks, but its what the user would be using, so I'm accommodating for it.

So far, the message shows 2 parts; One with subtype PLAIN and one with subtype HTML. PLAIN shows the message intact, without html obviously. HTML shows broken html and a bunch of "=" at some regular interval, probably because it wasnt decoded correctly. So close, any ideas?

Roger_Ramjet

Well you need to decode it. It is probably base64 given the '==', but you need to check the headers to be sure. There are a couple of base64 decode functions to choose from, the imap_base64 is what I would start with and move on if it does not work.

Quick not: if you have Outlook the you'll find Outlook Spy a useful tool for examining email properties directly.

teamtravis

imap_base64 didnt work. Where in outlook spy would it show the encoding?

teamtravis

bump, output shows as the following...

This is also a body that is very long and will =3D contain carriage returns. the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog the quick =3D brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy =3D dog

Roger_Ramjet

Looks like =3D is a line break after 40 cols, so just strip it out

teamtravis

Crudely I stripped it (and some other nonsense strings) out, but sure would like to know how to decode it correctly in case other special characters cause trouble.

Weedpacket

It's called "quoted-printable".
PHP comes with a function for that: [man]quoted_printable_decode[/man].

teamtravis

Eureka, that appears to have worked. I'll continue QAing it. Thanks!