How to personalize with PHP mailing list

[Anon]

Hi,

I'm creating a pretty sophisticated PHP mailing list tool. I want to be able to send personalized mails to my subscribers, i.e.

Dear <firstname>

Thank you for subscribing.

You subscribed with <email>.

Does anyone know a method that allows these flags to be recognized and replaced with the data from the current row (I'm using a piped text file)?

[Anon]

After retrieving the values from the database into a variable, you could try:

str_replace("<firstname>",$firstnamevar,$textfilevar);

where $firstnamevar is the value retrieved from the database and $textfilevar is the entire message inside a variable.

[neville]

I believe each contact in your text file will be place on a new line and the name and email etc are separated by a pipe sign.

If this is the case you can take the whole file into a string and split() it into an array based on the newline
Run a loop thru the length of this array and for each rep. in this loop you can do a split() again to extract the persons details into another array... this way for each contact you will be able to form the following variables
$name= arr[0] ;
$email = arr[1]; ....etc.

then use your mail function to send the mail.

I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it ..... The performance again depends on the size of your text file and the number of attributes to each contact.

Hope this helped