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PHP HTML Email Function
Posted on September 24, 2008 in PHP by Elliott BrueggemanNo Comments »

PHP provides the mail() function for easy sending of mail from your PHP server. The problem is that sending HTML email (the most popular format for emails) is not easily done using native PHP functions. I’ve provided below a somewhat foolproof function that will allow you to send HTML emails.

Simply pass in a to address, from address, from name (which is used as a nickname in email clients instead of displaying the sender’s email address), subject, and a properly formatted HTML email message.

If you are sending to multiple recipients, you can pass the $to_email parameter in as an array of multiple email addresses.

HTML Email Function

function send_email ($to_email, $from_email, $from_name, $subject, $msg) {
	//split up to email array, if given
	if (is_array($to_email)) {
		$to_email_string = implode(', ', $to_email);
	}
	else {
		$to_email_string = $to_email;
	}
 
	//Assemble headers
	$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
	$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
	$headers .= "From: $from_name <$from_email>" . "\r\n";
 
	//send via PHP's mail() function
	mail($to_email_string, $subject, $msg, $headers);
}

Usage

You call the function like this:

send_email("me@gmail.com", "roger@att.com", "Roger", "Hello There", 
  "<html>Hello There <strong>Bob</strong>! How are you doing</html>!");

Or, alternately, you call it like this when sending to multiple email addresses:

send_email(array("me@gmail.com", "sal@gmail.com"), "roger@att.com", "Roger", 
  "Hello There", "<html>Hello There <strong>Bob</strong>! How are you doing</html>!");

HTML Email Formatting

Remember that formatting HTML for email is different than for webpages. Do not use a CSS file and do not declare CSS in the head of your document. Instead, use either inline CSS or “Old School” HTML like font tags for formatting. Also, don’t use JavaScript, as major email clients don’t support it.

Though it may seem obvious, remember that images and links within your HTML email need to be full, absolute paths to their world wide web accessible location. No relative links!

PHP trim_text() function – shorten text without cutting words in half
Posted on September 9, 2008 in PHP by Elliott Brueggeman4 Comments »

Here’s another PHP function I cannot live without – I add this into my standard PHP functions include on all projects. Often when displaying text, I am forced to abbreviate the text to a certain number of characters. You might jump in a decide to use substring() on your text to achieve this abbreviation, but that can cause several problems. The most blatant is that you will often split the text right in the middle of a word. In addition, if there are any HTML tags in the text, they could get cut in the middle too, or have the closing tag left off completely, potentially breaking the display or exposing the remaining part of the tag.

As a solution to these problems, I have written a function that only trims on the last space before the number of characters you specify, so it will never cut words in half. Also, it strips out HTML tags before doing the character trim, preventing possible display issues. And, as a convenience it adds ellipses (the …) to all trimmed text, as a visual cue to the reader that the text has been abbreviated.

<?php
/**
 * trims text to a space then adds ellipses if desired
 * @param string $input text to trim
 * @param int $length in characters to trim to
 * @param bool $ellipses if ellipses (...) are to be added
 * @param bool $strip_html if html tags are to be stripped
 * @return string 
 */
function trim_text($input, $length, $ellipses = true, $strip_html = true) {
	//strip tags, if desired
	if ($strip_html) {
		$input = strip_tags($input);
	}
 
	//no need to trim, already shorter than trim length
	if (strlen($input) <= $length) {
		return $input;
	}
 
	//find last space within length
	$last_space = strrpos(substr($input, 0, $length), ' ');
	$trimmed_text = substr($input, 0, $last_space);
 
	//add ellipses (...)
	if ($ellipses) {
		$trimmed_text .= '...';
	}
 
	return $trimmed_text;
}
?>