Question

So I Have a form that will send out emails that correspond to how they filled the form. I have to take some information that was filled in the form and put it in a HTML form to send in a email which is done in php.

My question is, is there anyway to turn that form into a attachable file that could just be added to the mail function and sent instead?

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

Yes, you can transform your HTML form into a… HTML page (using HTML tokens manually, or maybe something like TCPDF?), and save it to a temporary disk file, then attach it to the outgoing email. Of course, your mail function must support attachments! (If it doesn’t, use a different mailer functions – there’s many of them).

You can do it quickly by preparing the form manually and replacing the text fields with something like {{ Name }}.

Then just run a str_replace on the file_get_contents() of your template and save the results in a temporary file:

 $translate = array(
     '{{ Name }}'    => $Form['Name'],
     ....
 );
 // one could also use preg_replace with 'e' flag and use directly $Form...
 $html = str_replace(array_keys($translate), array_values($translate),
            file_get_contents("form-template.html"));

In just the same way you can prepare a Word document, save it as RTF (which is ASCII readable), and attach the file with .doc extension — most word processors will open it automatically.

If you want to send a PDF file (using TCPDF, FPDF, etc.), it’s a bit more complicated but not too much.