Question

I am trying to make a form letter using PHP. I have a view that has a text area that has some pre-populated text. The text is like a letter: Dear So-and-so, etc.

There are a few places that I need to fill in specific, dynamic data from the db, but otherwise I need to let the user change the wording of the other parts of the email as necessary. I am thinking of putting a random character sequence to mark each place I am going to insert a new value.

So I submit the form to a PHP page and I pull the text out into a string variable. As I get ready to email it off I need to make sure that those placeholders are updated. How can I replace the contents of the string variable with the value of a variable?

EDIT – Example. This is what I currently have inside of the string variable in the PHP file that is processing the action of the form.

Hi %@

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to remind you that in %@ days you need to do something.

As a team we are currently at %@ percent.

Answer 1

What I use to do is something like as follows.

$email_text = "Hello ###user###,    
                  You have a new Event on ###date### at ###time### for ###hours### hour.    
                  Please let me know if you are attending. 

                  Have Fun.
                  ###site###";

$email_text =   str_replace('###user###',$username,$email_text);
$email_text =   str_replace('###date###',date('M dS, Y', strtotime($date)),$email_text);
$email_text =   str_replace('###time###',$time,$email_text);
$email_text =   str_replace('###hours###',$hours,$email_text);
$email_text =   str_replace('###site###',$site,$email_text);

I hope this will make pretty much clear that, how you can work this out.