Question

I want to open an email from a link that is the persons email address, which is displayed in a table with their personal information.

I can ‘kind of’ get it to work doing this;

<a href="mailto:<?php $person['Person']['primEmail']; ?>"><?php echo $person['Person']['primEmail']; ?></a>

The new email opens using the default mail client, however the email address is not populated in the ‘To:’ field, which is really what I am after.

Answer 1

The code you have produces the following:

<a href="mailto:">[e-mail]</a>

Which causes the behavior you’re experiencing because the href attribute isn’t pointing to an actual email address. This is due to the missing print or echo in the href attribute. Your code should look like this, instead:

<a href="mailto:<?php echo $person['Person']['primEmail']; ?>"><?php echo $person['Person']['primEmail']; ?></a>

Which will produce:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">[e-mail]</a>

And will work as intended.