[RESOLVED] rn

[justins]

Not sure if this is a php question or not...

I have a php script that email the contents of a text field in a form as an html email. Problem is that each instance of rn in the text is converted to a return, so

you can do this alternatively if you want

becomes:

you can do this alte
atively if you want

any ideas appreciated...

[bradgrafelman]

My idea would be to find the code that is replacing "rn" with "\r\n" (which is subsequently getting replaced with some form of "<br>" if it's an HTML message) and get rid of it.

[justins]

wow, do you really have that many posts?!

Well all the script does is use mail() to sent the mail, so it's obviously there that it's happening. I would guess that somewhere in the manual for mail () at php.net there's an answer for me, but I've yet to find it. Just wondered if anybody might be able to save me some trawling....

[bradgrafelman]

The problem definitely has nothing to do with mail() itself.

Can you show us your PHP script that sends the message?

[justins]

//message
$message="message including html tags and the word alternative in which the rn becomes a new line";

//headers

$someemail="[e-mail]";

$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: '.$someemail . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: [e-mail]'.','.$someemailemail. "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: '.$someemail .' <'.$someemail.'>' . "\r\n";

// Mail it
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

[justins]

oh, and $message is stripslashed and then escaped before mailing it. This is to do with it also being added to a mysql database, but I still don't see why that should do anything to "alternative"....

[bradgrafelman]

justins;10998844 wrote:

oh, and $message is stripslashed and then escaped before mailing it.

Can you show us all of the statement(s) that do this?

justins;10998844 wrote:

This is to do with it also being added to a mysql database

Why does the fact that the data comes from a DB have anything to do with the need for it to be 'stripslashed and then escaped'?

Data coming from your DB should never have slashes in it; if it does, then you've got something wrong with the way you store data in your DB.

[justins]

The data is going to a database after mailing, not coming from it. I think I'm getting a bit of a muddle with this. What I want to do is:

1)Take the text entered in a form text field on page 1

2)Display that text exactly as it was entered in page 1 (with line breaks, quotes etc) on page 2

3)Email that text, with quotes, line breaks etc

4)Escape the text and add it to a database

What's the best way to do this without breaking the page or displaying slashes anywhere?

[bradgrafelman]

justins;10998851 wrote:

2)Display that text exactly as it was entered in page 1 (with line breaks, quotes etc) on page 2

For that, you'd want to use something like [man]nl2br/man to translate literal line breaks into the HTML '<br>' entity. Otherwise, data like this:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

if directly echo'd into an HTML document is going to look like this when rendered (e.g. by your web browser):

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3

justins;10998851 wrote:

3)Email that text, with quotes, line breaks etc

Again, you've gotta be careful about what you mean by "line breaks." If the e-mail is sent as an HTML document, the same issue above applies. Otherwise, you'd want to simply use the POST'ed data as-is (e.g. with normal CRLF/LF line break characters).

justins;10998851 wrote:

4)Escape the text and add it to a database

To do this, you'd simply use the string escaping function provided by the PHP extension you're using or use prepared statements.

Note that if you store the data in the DB as-is without converting line breaks (this would be my preference), you'll want to again use [man]nl2br/man every time you retrieve the data and insert it into an HTML document.

[justins]

Thanks!