Question

I’m really new to PHP, so this is probably a pretty dumb question.

I’m using PHP to submit an email form, and would like the email to contain the values of some of the form’s inputs. Here’s a stripped down version:

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
  $to = '[e-mail]' ;
  $subject = 'Subject';
  $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
  $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
  $message =

  //here are the values that the email will send me 
  "<p>".$_POST('some-name')."</p>
   <p>".$_POST('some-name')."</p>" ;

  mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
  header('Location: ../estimate.html');
} ?>

The value of input some-name is, say, 10-widgets posted from the form.

Here’s the question: instead of listing “10-widgets” twice (as the above code will do), how do I list the first part in the first <p> (so it would be “10”) and the second part in the second <p> (so it would be “widgets”)?

Something like the following seems promising:

$wholeVal = $_POST('some-name');
$partVal = explode("-",$wholeVal);

and then, somewhere, $_POST($partVal[0]); and $_POST($partVal[1]);

But I don’t know where this should take place, and anywhere I put it seems to make the whole thing break.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

First, you should access $_POST with brackets, like $_POST['some-name']. explode returns an array. So in your example, explode('-', '10-widgets')[0] will return '10' and explode('-', '10-widgets')[1] will return 'widgets'

So your code will be something like this:

<?php
  if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
    $to = '[e-mail]' ;
    $subject = 'Subject';
    $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
    $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

    $parts = explode('-', $_POST['some-name']);

    //here are the values that the email will send me 
    $message = 
      "<p>".$parts[0]."</p>
      <p>".$parts[1]."</p>";

    mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
    header('Location: ../estimate.html');
  } 
?>