I have a contact form on my joomla website – yet for some reason

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Asked: June 15, 20262026-06-15T19:30:47+00:00 2026-06-15T19:30:47+00:00

I have a contact form on my joomla website – yet for some reason

0

I have a contact form on my joomla website – yet for some reason all of a sudden the emails are starting to come through with things like %22, %40, %0A instead of the symbols?

I’ve tried using htmlspecialchars_decode, and a few other options but can’t seem to get rid of them other than using str_replace, but obviously that won’t get rid of all of the characters. Can anyone help me out? I’m not sure why it’s changed all of a sudden.

Here’s my contact form:

<form name="contact" id="contact">
  <div id="contactForm">
    <div class="information">
      <div class="__left">Name: *</div>
      <div class="__right"><input type="text" name="name" id="name" class="inputbox required" /></div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="information">
      <div class="__left">Email: *</div>
      <div class="__right"><input type="text" name="email" id="email" class="inputbox required email" /></div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="information">
      <div class="__left">Phone: *<br /><em>(Please include area code - XX XXXX XXXX)</em></div>
      <div class="__right"><input type="text" name="phone" id="phone" class="inputbox required phone" /></div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="information">
      <div class="__left">Message: *</div>
      <div class="__right"><textarea name="message" id="message" rows="10" class="inputbox required"></textarea></div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="__right"><input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit" class="button" /></div>
    <div class="clear"></div>
  </div>
</form>

and here’s the php:

$name       = htmlspecialchars_decode(JRequest::getVar('e_name'));
        $email      = htmlspecialchars_decode(str_replace('%40','@',JRequest::getVar('e_email')));
        $phone      = htmlspecialchars_decode(JRequest::getVar('e_phone'));
        $body       = htmlspecialchars_decode(str_replace('%0A','<br />',JRequest::getVar('e_message')));


        //send an email             
        $emailto        = $emailto;
        $emailfrom      = $email;
        $emailfromname  = $name;
        $subject        = $subject;

        # prepare email body text
        $message = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
        <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>'. $subject .'</title>
        </head>
        <body>
        <p>'. $body .'</p>
        <hr />
        <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
          <tr>
            <td width="300" align="left" valign="top">Name:</td>
            <td align="left" valign="top">'. $name .'</td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td align="left" valign="top">&nbsp;</td>
            <td align="left" valign="top">&nbsp;</td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td align="left" valign="top">Email:</td>
            <td align="left" valign="top">'. $email .'</td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td align="left" valign="top">&nbsp;</td>
            <td align="left" valign="top">&nbsp;</td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td align="left" valign="top">Phone:</td>
            <td align="left" valign="top">'. $phone .'</td>
          </tr>
        </table>
        </body>
        </html>';

        // send email
        if (JUtility::sendMail($emailfrom, $emailfromname, $emailto, $subject, $message, 1, $cc, $bcc, $attachment, $replyto, $replytoname)) {
            $response[] = 1;        
        } else {
            $response[] = 0;
        };