Question

I’ve created a very simple PHP system to send emails to a mailinglist using a MySQL database and PHP. It’s not finished yet and as mails sent through the mail() function go into the junk-folder in most mailing programs straight away, I’ll connect to my SMTP server using PHP in the future. Though there’s something that I’d like to solve first.

<table border="0">
<form method="post" action="send.php">
<tr><td>Onderwerp:</td><td><input type="text" style="width:200px;" name="sub" /></td></tr>
<tr><td>Bericht:</td><td><textarea name="mes" style="width:200px; height:100px;"></textarea></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td><input type="submit" style="width:200px;" value="Verzend" /></td></tr>
</form>
</table>

When a message is filled in in the above textarea it is submitted to the following script (send.php):

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$to      = $row['email'];
$subject = $_POST['sub'];
$message = $_POST['mes'];
$headers = 'From: [e-mail]>' .  "\r\n" . 'Reply-To: [e-mail]' . "\r\n" . 'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion() . "\r\n" . 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n" . 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
}

Of course there’s some more script above this to connect to the db etc., but that’s not relevant here. As you can see, the message text received through $_POST is put into a variable used in the mail() function.

But when I use multiple lines in the textarea, at some point in the script this is all converted into one huge line which will create a messy email in the end. As some of you might have seen, I’ve already created a header that says the mail’s content is HTML. This is because I put a <p> element around the text sent through $_POST. I tried to remove this as it might be the thing converting it all into one line. But this didn’t help.

Of course you can use <br /> in HTML, but it would be silly to ask all the users of the list to use that to create a new line. So: Is there a way to make the multiple lines remain in the email without having to fill in anything different in the textfield?

Thanks for answering in advance!

Answer 1

Perhaps ypu are looking for nl2br function in php..

$message = nl2br($_POST['mes']);