accented characters from field mail

[digitalecartoon]

I've made a flash mailform. This communicates with below script to send the mail. Which works ok. I've used utf8_decode to also make it send accented characters like ë á é ü etc. In the message field this works ok. All accented characters display. In the 'from' field however, these accented characters still appear funny. Like when it should display 'René' in the from-field, it displays 'renX' in the from-field. In the message field is still display's René.

What do I have to do to also make it work in the from-field?

<?php
// initialize variables for To and Subject fields
$to = '[e-mail]';
$subject = 'Een vraag';
$from = stripslashes(utf8_decode($_POST['from']));
$email = stripslashes(utf8_decode($_POST['email']));
$comments = stripslashes(utf8_decode($_POST['comments']));

// build message body from variables received in the POST array
$message = 'Van: ' . $from . "\n\n";
$message .= 'Email: '. $email ."\n\n";
$message .= 'Bericht: '. $comments;

//convert flash line breaks
$message = ereg_replace("\r", "\n", $message);

// add additional email headers for more user-friendly reply
$additionalHeaders = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$additionalHeaders .= "Content-type: text/html; charset= ISO 8859-1\r\n"; 
$additionalHeaders .= "From: " . $from ." <" . $email . ">\r\n"; 
$additionalHeaders .= "Reply-To: " . $email;


// send email message
$OK = mail($to, $subject, $message, $additionalHeaders);
// let Flash know what the result was
if ($OK) {
  echo 'sent=OK';
  }
  else {
  echo 'sent=failed&reason='. urlencode('Er is een probleem met de server. Probeer het later nog eens.');
  }
?>

[halojoy]

I have no idea how to do this
but try to see if charset UTF-8 makes any difference

$additionalHeaders .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\r\n"; 

[digitalecartoon]

I entered as the name in the from field 'René'. The mail arrived like this:

Onderwerp: accented letters
Van: "RenX" <[e-mail]>
Datum: Za, maart 13, 2010 16:19
Aan: [e-mail]
Van: Ren&#233; Email: [e-mail] Bericht: test mail

As you can see, the message part is ok. Only the from field results in RenX as the name, where it should be Ren&#233;. How to make that one use accented letters too??

[Bjom]

What default charset do you have set?

echo 'default_charset = ' . ini_get('default_charset');

If it is other than UTF-8, then try adding this line to the ini (if you can - else use ini_set) and see if it helps:

default_charset = "UTF-8"

[digitalecartoon]

I found out this helped:
$additionalHeaders .= "From: " . mb_encode_mimeheader($from, "iso-8859-1", "Q") ." <" . $email . ">\r\n";

Now the name uses accented letters in the From field to. But is this the right way to do it? (don't exactly know what this mb_encode_mimeheader does). Somehow the From field doesn't know to use iso8859-1, while the rest appearently does?

[digitalecartoon]

I've now set everything to utf-8.

?php
// initialize variables for To and Subject fields
$to = '[e-mail]';
$subject = 'Een testmail';
$from = $_POST["from"];
$email = $_POST["email"];
$comments = $_POST["comments"];

// build message body from variables received in the POST array
$message = "Van: $from \n\n";
$message .= "Email: $email \n\n";
$message .= "Bericht: $comments";
$message = stripslashes($message);

//convert flash line breaks
$message= str_replace("\r", "\n", $message);
$message=nl2br($message);

// add additional email headers for more user-friendly reply
$additionalHeaders = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$additionalHeaders .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\r\n";
$additionalHeaders .= "From: $from < $email >\r\n";
$additionalHeaders .= "Reply-To: $email\r\n";


// send email message
$OK = mail($to, $subject, $message, $additionalHeaders);
// let Flash know what the result was
if ($OK) {
  echo 'sent=OK';
  }
  else {
  echo 'sent=failed&reason='. urlencode('Er is een probleem met de server. Probeer het later nog eens.');
  }
?> 

When I view a mail in text mode, the message part works like it should: René stays René. The from field is still displaying RenX. I think that's because the from field is really html even if the mail is in text mode?

When I vie a mail in html mode, the message field screws up to. The from field still says RenX and the message reads rené, where both should display René.

So I think it's a html issue? How do I make é display as é when everything is in html? Meaning the from-field, cc-field, message field etc.

[digitalecartoon]

I narrowed it down to this:

<?php


$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset= UTF-8\r\n";
$headers .= "From: René <[e-mail]>\r\n";


$OK = mail('[e-mail]', 'A question', 'René is my name', $headers);


if ($OK) {
  echo 'sent=OK';
  }
  else {
  echo 'sent=failed&reason='. urlencode('There is a problem with the server. Try again later.');
  }
?>

Which gives me RenX in the From field. As I mentioned earlier, mb_encode_mimeheader fixes this. But can anyone tell me why I have to do this? Found this piece of come somewhere, but couldn't find anything about it in the 'mail' section on php.net. Why won't headers accept utf-8 characters even if I set the charset to it? Can someone provide me a link to a php.net page which explains this?

[dagon]

email is 7bit that's why, its why anything binary embeded in an email such as an image has to be base64 encoded.

if you really care, read rfc2045-9

[Bjom]

Or maybe just the wiki articles on MIME and E-Mail for a start. They seem to be quite educating - i'll go and read them some time SOON&#8482; myself 😉

From what I've seen in the php manual on multi byte stuff, this looks about right to me as an answer - I'm not expert at email stuff at all though.