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Asked: 2026-05-28T20:48:13+00:00

I’ve never done that before and simply need a little advice how to do

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I’ve never done that before and simply need a little advice how to do so …

I have a index.php file with a simple contact form.

<form id="contactform" method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"] ?>">

The index.php file has the following script on top.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US">

<?php

    //Vars
    $Name = Trim(stripslashes($_POST['author']));
    $EmailFrom = Trim(stripslashes($_POST['email']));
    $Subject = Trim(stripslashes($_POST['subject']));
    $Type = Trim(stripslashes($_POST['type']));
    $Comment = Trim(stripslashes($_POST['message']));
    $EmailTo = "address@something.com";

    //Validation
    $valid = true;
    if ( $Name == "" ) $valid = false;
    if ( isValidEmail( $EmailFrom ) == 0 ) $valid = false;
    if ($Subject == "") $valid = false;
    if ($Comment == "") $valid = false;
    function isValidEmail( $email = null ) {
        return preg_match( "/^[\d\w\/+!=#|$?%{^&}*`'~-][\d\w\/\.+!=#|$?%{^&}*`'~-]*@[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9.-]{1,61}[A-Z0-9]\.[A-Z]{2,6}$/ix", $email );
    }

    //Body
    $Body = $Type;
    $Body .= "\n\n";
    $Body .= $Comment;

    //Headers
    $email_header = "From: " . $EmailFrom . "\r\n";
    $email_header .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n";
    $email_header .= "Reply-To: " . $EmailFrom . " \r\n";

    //Send
    if ($valid)
        $success = mail($EmailTo, $Subject, $Body, $email_header);

?>

I have two questions now:

1.)
How exactly can I render/not-render certain stuff when either the validation went wrong or a success or an error comes back when submitting the mail?

e.g. I know that I can do that! 

        if ( !$valid )
            print "Failed to make contact. Enter valid login credentials! <a href='/#contact' title='try again'>try again?</a>";

        if ( $success )
            print "Successfully made contact.";
        else
            print "Failed to make contact. <a href='/#contact' title='try again'>try again?</a>"; */

    ?>

However $valid will always be wrong on page-load when not submitting the form and also the email will always return the error message on the first page load. How can I only render or not render specific stuff when the form is submitted?

E.g. When submitting the form and a success comes back I don’t want to render the #contactform anymore. I simply want to print “Successfully made contact” into an h1 or so.

How can I make that happen? It’s probably rather simple I just can’t find a solution for myself.

2.)
When using $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"] or PHP_SELF as action the url after submitting the form will always change to “mydomain.com/index.php”. Can I prevent that from happening? I want to submit the index.php file itself however I just don’t like it when /index.php is written into the url. Is it possible to stop that from happening?

Thank you for your help!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Matt,

    For the first question as to printing to the screen based on success or failure of the email, your checks seem fine, but you probably aren’t going to get an email failure in time to display that to the screen. That said, you just need to wrap your second set of code in an if statement. Something like this:

    if( isset($_POST['Submit']) ){  //only attempt to display if form submitted.
    //Your code here
}

    As for not including the directory in the form action, there are many ways to do this, but here’s one:

    $scriptString= explode('/',$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);
$scriptSize = count($scriptString)-1;
$script = $scriptString[$scriptSize];

    And then use $script in the form action.

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