Igor Partola

Square root of a piece of pie

Posts Tagged PHP

Proper way to send e-mail from PHP

Apr 14

Posted by Igor in Web Development | No Comments

Depending on your setup, PHP might not be sending properly encoded e-mails if you just use the mail() function. Specifically, headers might not be properly encoded, and this includes the subject, the To, and Reply-To, etc.  Just give it a try using some non-ASCII characters and see if it works. If it doesn’t, here’s a better way:

// At the beginning of each page load, set internal encoding to UTF-8
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

// ... rest of initialization code

// Headers are an associative array, unlike the original mail() function
function better_mail($email, $subject, $body, Array $headers = array(), $additional_parameter = NULL) {
    // Make sure we set Content-Type and charset
    if ( !isset( $headers['Content-Type'] ) ) {
        $headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain; charset=utf-8';
    }

    $headers_str = '';
    foreach( $headers as $key => $val ) {
        $headers_str .= sprintf( "%s: %s\r\n", $key, $val );
    }

    // Use mb_send_mail() function instead of mail() so that headers, including subject are properly encoded
    return mb_send_mail( $email, $subject, $body, $headers_str, $additional_parameters );
}

better_mail( 'example@example.com', 'Résumé with non-ASCII characters', 'Résumé content.', array( 'From' => 'noreply@example.com' ) );

For more information see:

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This does not scale well

Dec 19

Posted by Igor in Web Development | No Comments

Here is a piece of code I just found:

  # new location
  # creates new record or seeks empty record marked by group_id = -2
  if($CGI_DATA['new'] == 'New Location') {
    # look for empty - abandoned record
    $SQL  = "SELECT * FROM location WHERE group_id = -2";
    $result = mysql_query($SQL);
    if($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
      $CGI_DATA['location_id'] = $row['location_id'];
    } else {
      $SQL  = "INSERT INTO location SET group_id = '-2',location_bname='New Location',location_roomnum='',
              location_capacity=0,location_address='',location_order=0,location_status='active'";
      $result = mysql_query($SQL);
      $CGI_DATA['location_id'] = mysql_insert_id();
    }
    $CGI_DATA['edit']='New';
  }

A little background: this application has a number of groups each of which can specify several locations. What the above code does is it inserts a location with an “invalid” (-2) group_id, and then allows you to “edit” that record on the next page load. I don’t know how they thought this was acceptable.

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