Question

I have a PHP script that I’m invoking from another shell script that sends an automated email with a message generated from the shell script. Problem is, when I send the message all the newline characters are printed into the message. How do I get them to be interpreted?

sendmail.sh:

/path/to/phpscript/sendmail.php "Some Message With Newlines\nHello World.\n"

sendmail.php:

$message = $argv[1] . "\nNewline";
$smtp->send($to, $from, $message);

The odd thing is the \n after the $argv variable is interpreted and actually prints Newline on a new line, but the newlines in the $argv variable don’t, I have tried wrapping the variable in double quotes among other things but so far to no avail.

Answer 1

What about calling your script with real newlines :

$ php temp.php "Some Message With Newlines
> Hello World.
> "

With temp.php containing this :

var_dump($argv[1]);

Gets me the following output :

string(40) "Some Message With Newlines
Hello World.
"

---

Edit : another solution could be to use something like this to call your PHP script :

$ echo -e "Some Message With Newlines\nHello World.\n" | php temp.php

And, modify your PHP script so it read from stdin, instead of $argv :

var_dump(file_get_contents('php://stdin'));