Question

I have a form on my website that is submitted to my email address; the structure of the email is as follows:

Name: John Smith

Address 1: 1 Kings Road

Address 2: Kings Place

City: London

Post Code: SW1

Enquiry Type: General Enquiry

Website: http://www.stackoverflow.com

Email: [e-mail]

Details: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed
do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim
ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut
aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

This is how it arrives to me in my inbox. I have several of these emails – and I need to export the data from these emails in to my database. I have all the fields set up in the database (name, address1, etc), so now all I need to do is extract each piece of data from the email.

I have set up a form with a textarea field – the idea being that I copy and paste the contents of the email into that textarea and then submit the form. The processing of the data will be done in the PHP script.

I am struggling to figure out how best to do this – I could do with some ideas. Thanks.

Answer 1

If the email would be coming in exactly like this each time, you could try two things:

1. Regex. It’ll be a bit nasty, but it should get the job done with enough blood.
2. Blind parsing. I like this approach, which is what I’ll try and describe.

I’d try splitting the email’s body with explode("\n", $body).

Now, index of the array will contain one line of your email. You can just assign a number of characters to chop off to each line (to strip out the field name) and you are all set.