tutorial for send article to a friend

[Anon]

Desperately seeking a thorough tutorial for a newbie on how to send a news article stored in a mysql database in email "to a friend" as text.

Specifically, I don't know how to "grab" the content and and put it in an email.

I have worked with php, html forms and email successfully but I'm just don't know how to grab the content of an html page that is generated dynamically from a mysql database, strip it of the html tags, images, etc. and prep it for text email.

If a good tutorial exists out there I have not been able to find it after several hours of searching the internet.

I would really appreciate your help! Thank you, Shawna

[ame12]

Well... not sure this is that common of a task to get done. Firstly regarding mail. The mail() function will essentially do what you want and there are lots of references to how to use it on this site and the web.

Regarding stripping the HTML... two ways I can think of doing it. First is harder: use SAX (XML support) to read the markup and interpret the real text. This is a major pain and may not work with non-well-formed documents.

Second is easier: just parse the HTML yourself, looking for less-than chars and skipping the text until you get to a greater-than char. Pick off the text you want if you're not inside a tag... or based upon the tag you just read. This would take a little bit of work but is not difficult.

Dave

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