please help with parse error?!

boyjarv

I get the following message when I try and send an email:

error message: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in D:\jbiddulph.com\wwwroot\iphone\send_email.php on line 10

<?php

//change this to your email.
$to = "example@example.com";
$from = $HTTP_POST_VARS['email'];
$subject = "email from iphone.example.com";

//begin of HTML message
$message = <<<EOF
<html><body bgcolor="#DCEEFC"><b>$HTTP_POST_VARS['username'];</b><br><br><br>"."$HTTP_POST_VARS['message'];"."</body></html>
EOF;
   //end of message
    $headers  = "From: "$HTTP_POST_VARS['username'];
    $headers .= "Content-type: text/html\r\n";

//options to send to cc+bcc
//$headers .= "Cc: maa@example";
//$headers .= "Bcc: email@example.com[/email]";

// now lets send the email.
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

echo "Message has been sent....!";

?>

TheoGB

Looks like you're missing a starting " before <html><body> to me. Or something. I've never used EOF symbols before so I'm not really sure what to expect.

You've used " around the colour setting but then used them to break the string for the variable too.

johanafm

Quote from php manual

$POST
$HTTP_POST_VARS [deprecated]

So you might as well start by replacing http_post_vars with $POST.

TheoGB;10958478 wrote:
You've used " (...) but then used them to break the string for the variable too.

Actually he hasn't, but he might have thought he did so. Once he cleans up his code to be syntactically correct, part of his message will look like

<br>"."

where <br> of course would be replaced by a line break by an html user agent.

Easy to track down the actual problem if you change your very long one liner to something like

$message = <<<EOF
    <html><body bgcolor="#DCEEFC">
    <b>
    $_POST['username'];
    </b>
...
EOF

Now you won't have to look all over the place to find out where things go wrong. Once done with that, proceed to the heredoc manual and it will tell you a little something about embedding variables in heredoc strings.

bradgrafelman

Few more problems you'll need to address once you get beyond the parse errors:

```
$from = $HTTP_POST_VARS['email'];
```
You should never use a user-supplied e-mail address in the 'From' header and should instead always use a valid e-mail address on your domain. Doing otherwise will likely get you flagged as an open relay and automatically blacklisted from many e-mail servers.
```
$headers  = "From: "$HTTP_POST_VARS['username']; 
```
Not only do you not use the $from variable you defined above, but it's likely that this 'username' value isn't a valid e-mail address (something you should be validating, by the way - perhaps via the [man]filter[/man] extension?). This will likely cause your e-mails to get rejected simply because they have malformed headers.

Also note the additional parse error on this line (missing a concatenation operator between the two strings).
The next line:
```
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html\r\n"
```
doesn't add any line breaks between the previous header and the next, so you'll have something like "From: userContent-Type: ..." which is obviously incorrect.