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wordcross · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:48 pm Post subject: 1

So I volunteered to code an order form for the company I work for, and despite being mostly an amateur at web programming, I've managed to get just about everything in order, looking nice, and working.

Except for one thing. I have to have my php script send an e-mail containing the information from the order form and display it as a table inside the e-mail. I have been using the mail() function to pass along a string with all of the html code and information concatenated together. And it *almost*works, but there will be random cells that don't do what they're supposed to. They won't have a border, or there will be random fragments of html code in them, or one will be missing entirely and the contents will have displayed above the whole table. I ended up avoiding css at all costs and it has helped, but there must be something I am still missing.

To make sure that it wasn't my variables or logic causing problems, I created a test table full of regular data with no variables but the string to hold all of the code. I sent it in an e-mail and sure enough, I'm still getting fragments and artifacts that shouldn't be showing up. I even had the string echo onto the webpage before sending the e-mail to see if something was messing up there, but it always displays perfectly. So it's either the way I'm utilizing the mail() function or it's something to do with the e-mail clients that I don't know.

I'll post the test code in the next post (it's very long) and if anyone has *any* ideas, I'm happy to try whatever I can. I'm posting the whole length of my test code, despite its length, because when it is shorter it has problems much less often. But I need to be able to handle longer tables.
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

wordcross · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 9:48 pm Post subject: 2

Elethiomel · Daedalian Member

Maybe your message ought to be a complete HTML document, i.e. with <html><body><table>...</table></body></html>? I'm not sure what the convention is when sending HTML e-mails.

Otherwise, your html looks reasonably sane, so IDK.

Zag · Unintentionally offensive old coot

So if you do exactly the above, you have problems? Or do you sometimes have empty cells? Note that empty cells sometimes will not get borders (it's browser dependent -- welcome to my world). The trick, if you have variable data which might be blank, is to prefix it with   which is a non-breaking space. It shows up just as a space, but it is considered enough content in a table cell so that it isn't blank.

Assuming that the exact text you have above is causing problems, then there is an issue in your mail output. It's possible that it is trying to "help" by adding newlines after certain length without one. If one of those happens to fall between the < and the / of a </td> or a </tr> then it will cause exactly the sort of problems you describe. You should be able to view source on your email to see what it thinks it is getting.

I don't know php, but if you can tell it to put a newline after every close td, then your mail system might be less inclined to be helpful. Or else something else is going wrong. But your html looks good to me (in a quick glance).

Another thing to consider is whether any of your data might have html snippets in it, which will, of course, screw up your html if it isn't encoded.

extropalopakettle · No offense, but....

wordcross · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 1:21 pm Post subject: 6

Thanks extro!

I suspected that this was the issue, and I actually found that link while googling also, but I wasn't sure how that applied to html code, whether the tags are part of the total or not, how the various processes determine line breaks or how to insert my own. Now I know. And I am *so* happy that it's fairly easily fixable Revenge most foul!

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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

wordcross · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2013 1:26 pm Post subject: 7

also, @elethiomel:
I tried that as well, and it turns out you can do it either way. I was hoping that using the entire html page would let me use css, but it turns out that gmail actually strips any <style> tags right from the get-go, and other e-mail clients are not much better at implementing them.
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Zag · Unintentionally offensive old coot