Page 539 - Beginning PHP 5.3
P. 539
Chapter 16: PHP and the Outside World
You can send this email message in much the same way as a plain text email; the only difference is
that you need to include two additional headers in the email message:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
MIME - Version: tells the mail reader application to expect a message in MIME format (as well as the
version of MIME being used), and Content - Type: specifies the type of content to expect. In this case,
text/html; charset=utf - tells the mail reader to expect an HTML email encoded in the UTF - 8
8
(Unicode) character set.
So to send the HTML email just shown, you could write:
$headers = “From: The Widget Company < widgets@example.com > \r\n”;
$headers .= “MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n”;
$headers .= “Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n”;
$recipient = “John Smith < johnsmith@example.com > ”;
$subject = “Thank you for contacting us”;
mail( $recipient, $subject, $message, $headers );
If you want to send more than one component in the message — for example, an alternate plain text
version of the message body, or several image attachments — you need to create a multipart MIME
message. Multipart content types are outside the scope of this book and are more complex than sending
a single - part email message. However, the Mail_Mime PEAR package makes this process very easy. For
more information see http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime .
Try It Out Create a Contact Form Script
A common requirement for a Web site is a “contact us” form that visitors can use to contact the owner
of the site. In this example you create such a form, along with the PHP code to process the form and
email the results to the site owner.
Save the following script as contact.php in your document root folder:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Contact Us</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”common.css” />
<style type=”text/css”>
.error { background: #d33; color: white; padding: 0.2em; margin:
0.2em 0 0.2em 0; font-size: 0.9em; }
fieldset { border: none; padding: 0; }
ol {list-style-type: none; padding: 0; margin: 0; }
input, select, textarea { float: none; margin: 1em 0 0 0; width:
auto; }
div.element { float: right; width: 57%; }
div.element label { display: inline; float: none; }
select { margin-right: 0.5em; }
span.required { display: none; }
</style>
</head>
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