PHP contact form redirect - php

Question

I have a PHP contact form, when a user fills the form and hits send button the form gets redirected to the home page. I want to send a success/failure message on the home/index page while redirecting. How can I do the same?
I have an idea to store a success/failure message in a session and then call it on the home page but touching php afer a long time hence need assistance on how to achieve the same. Any ideas and thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
Form Codes (it's on a separate file than home page):
<?php if (isset($_POST['email'])) {
// EDIT THE 2 LINES BELOW AS REQUIRED
$email_to = "admin#hillierroaddentalclinic.com.au";
$email_subject = "Enquiry from Hiller Road Dental Clinic Website";
function died($error)
{
// your error code can go here
echo "We are very sorry, but there were error(s) found with the form you submitted. ";
echo "These errors appear below.<br /><br />";
echo $error . "<br /><br />";
echo "Please go back and fix these errors.<br /><br />";
die();
}
// validation expected data exists
if (!isset($_POST['name']) || !isset($_POST['email']) || !isset($_POST['phone']) || !isset($_POST['message'])) {
died('We are sorry, but there appears to be a problem with the form you submitted.');
}
$name = $_POST['name']; // required
$email = $_POST['email']; // required
$phone = $_POST['phone']; // not required
$message = $_POST['message']; // required
$error_message = "";
$email_exp = '/^[A-Za-z0-9._%-]+#[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,4}$/';
if (!preg_match($email_exp, $email)) {
$error_message .= 'The Email Address you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
$string_exp = "/^[A-Za-z .'-]+$/";
if (!preg_match($string_exp, $name)) {
$error_message .= 'The Name you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
if (strlen($message) < 2) {
$error_message .= 'The Comments you entered do not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
if (strlen($error_message) > 0) {
died($error_message);
}
$email_message = "Form details below.\n\n";
function clean_string($string)
{
$bad = array(
"content-type",
"bcc:",
"to:",
"cc:",
"href"
);
return str_replace($bad, "", $string);
}
$email_message .= "Name: " . clean_string($name) . "\n";
$email_message .= "Email: " . clean_string($email) . "\n";
$email_message .= "Phone: " . clean_string($phone) . "\n";
$email_message .= "Message: " . clean_string($message) . "\n";
// create email headers
$headers = 'From: ' . $email . "\r\n" . 'Reply-To: ' . $email . "\r\n" . 'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
#mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, $headers);
function Redirect($url, $permanent = false)
{
header('Location: ' . $url, true, $permanent ? 301 : 302);
exit();
}
Redirect('http://hillierroaddentalclinic.com.au/', false); } ?>

Answer 1

Contact from PHP
if(mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, $headers )){
header("location: index.php?status=1"); //success
}else{
header("location: index.php?status=0"); //failure
}
in index.php
if(isset($_GET['status'])){
$status = $_GET['status'];
if($status == 1){
echo "Thank you for your message";
}else if($status == 0){
echo "Unable to send message";
}
}
Getting the status value from URL in index.php, if the value is '1' then success message, if the status is '0' then the error message.

Answer 2

For achieving a redirection with PHP either you have to use header functionality. This will redirect to the page which you need to load. Otherwise, you can use form actions to change get redirection after form submission.
You can use the header() function to send a new HTTP header, but this must be sent to the browser before any HTML or text (so before the declaration, for example).
header('Location: '.$URL);
Here you can pass a parameter with a header according to the status. For example when you call header you can pass a parameter for displaying the message. Pass a variable and according to the variable show appropriate message.
In your case after sending an email your page in the header and either display message from the session and reset session or pass a variable with status and checking the status of the message display appropriate message in UI
PHP Header Reference
It's not a good practice to send an email like these if you are using it in a production environment. it may blacklist your domain. Use any SMTP credentials and mailer class to do it