PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Creating a Sample Application: Smart Form Mail
109
Listing 4.1
Continued
//invoke mail() function to send mail
mail($toaddress, $subject, $mailcontent, $fromaddress);
?>
Bob's Auto Parts - Feedback Submitted
Feedback submitted
Your feedback has been sent.
Generally, you should check that users have filled out all the required form fields using,
for example, isset().We have omitted this function call from the script and other
examples for the sake of brevity.
In this script, you can see that we have concatenated the form fields together and
used PHP’s mail() function to email them to feedback@example.com.This is a sample
email address. If you want to test the code in this chapter, substitute your own email
address here. Because we haven’t yet used mail(), we need to discuss how it works.
Unsurprisingly, this function sends email.The prototype for mail() looks like this:
bool mail(string to, string subject, string message,
string [additional_headers [, string additional_parameters]]);
The first three parameters are compulsory and represent the address to send email to, the
subject line, and the message contents, respectively.The fourth parameter can be used to
send any additional valid email headers.Valid email headers are described in the document
RFC822, which is available online if you want more details. (RFCs, or Requests
for Comment, are the source of many Internet standards; we discuss them in Chapter 20,
“Using Network and Protocol Functions.”) Here, the fourth parameter adds a From:
address for the mail.You can also use it to add Reply-To: and Cc: fields, among others.
If you want more than one additional header, just separate them by using newlines and
carriage returns (\n\r) within the string, as follows:
$additional_headers=”From: webserver@example.com\r\n “
.’Reply-To: bob@example.com";
The optional fifth parameter can be used to pass a parameter to whatever program you
have configured to send mail.
To use the mail() function, set up your PHP installation to point at your mailsending
program. If the script doesn’t work for you in its current form, an installation
issue might be at fault, check Appendix A,“Installing PHP and MySQL.”
Throughout this chapter, you enhance this basic script by making use of PHP’s string
handling and regular expression functions.