Php form handler/formatting of email message lost - php

Question

I've got a form on my website and when I added htmlspecialchars function to the php form handler, it seemed I also had to change the character encoding to utf-8 so that letters with accents would come through. Now that I've added $headers, the characters are shown correctly but the formatting of the email message ($message) is lost with no line breaks. This is what my code looks like:
$surname = htmlspecialchars($_POST["surname"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$firstname = htmlspecialchars($_POST["firstname"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$address = htmlspecialchars($_POST["address"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$age = htmlspecialchars($_POST["age"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$message = "
Website form:
Name: " . $firstname . " " . $surname . "
Address: " . $address . "
Age: " . $age . ";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n";
if (mail("me#me.com", $_POST['firstname'] ." ". $_POST['surname'], $message, $headers)) {
header("Location: ...");
}
I tried to fix the issue with
$message = "Website form\n";
$message .= "Name: " . $firstname . " " . $surname . "\n";
$message .= "Address: " . $address . "\n";
$message .= "Age: " . $age . "\n";
but the problem persists. I also tried to change content-type to text/plain but the email message appeared as an attachment file. I am at a loss and don't know what I'm doing wrong as the formatting is still lost. I'm a beginner with php so any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

You should try message format like this:
// email message
$message ="";
$message .= 'Website Form:'."\r\n";
$message .= 'Name:'. $firstname ." ". $surname . "\r\n";
$message .= 'Address:'. $address . "\r\n";
$message .= 'Age:'. $age . "\r\n";
Here is complete code:
<?php
$surname = htmlspecialchars($_POST["surname"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$firstname = htmlspecialchars($_POST["firstname"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$address = htmlspecialchars($_POST["address"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$age = htmlspecialchars($_POST["age"], ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
$to = 'youemail#email.com';
$subject = 'Subject Line';
$from = 'info#example.com';
// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
// Create email headers
$headers .= 'From: '.$from."\r\n".
'Reply-To: '.$from."\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
// email message
$message = "";
$message .= 'Website Form:'."\r\n";
$message .= 'Name:'. $firstname ." ". $surname . "\r\n";
$message .= 'Address:'. $address . "\r\n";
$message .= 'Age:'. $age . "\r\n";
// Sending email
if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)){
echo 'Your mail has been sent successfully.';
} else{
echo 'Unable to send email. Please try again.';
}
?>