Question

I have a very weird problem. I am using PHP, in my PHP code, I wrote the email content and generated this link:

....
<a href="http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey . '">http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey . '</a>
....

Most of the time, it works fine. Then, I receive lots of complaints saying they can’t activate. After checking their emails, I found this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=20090=hsdf87hsf89sd">http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=20090=hsdf87hsf89sd'</a>

The “&key” is missing. Why? Very weird bug!!!

The full PHP command:

$content = '<div style="font-family:Calibri; color:#333;">
    Hi there, <br><br>

    Thank you for register to our website, click the following link to activate your account:<br><br>

<a href="http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey . '">http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey . '</a><br><br>

XXX Team</div>';

Gumbo could be right, my email content is HTML-based:

$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8' . "\r\n";

Answer 1

You need to encode the & character with a character reference like &:

'<a href="http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&amp;key=' . $actkey . '">http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&amp;key=' . $actkey . '</a>'

Or better:

'<a href="' . htmlspecialchars('http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey) . '">' . htmlspecialchars('http://www.domain.com/act.php?id=' . $userid . '&key=' . $actkey) . '</a>'