Angle brackets in php - php

Question

I want to store angle brackets in a string in PHP because i want to eventually use mail() to send an HTML email out.
The following is the code that doesn't seem to work.
while(...) {
$msg .= "<img src=\"http://.../images/".$media['Path']."\"><br>";
echo "message: ".$msg."<br>";
}
What I want is for $msg to contain a bunch of images (provided by $media['Path']) that are separated by line breaks. Then $msg is passed into mail().
The echo confirms that no images are being sent. And, indeed, I receive no images in the email body. Why is this happening? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

There are two ways of embedding images in an email:
As external references: <img src="http://..."; and
Embedded in the email.
(1) is I guess what you're trying to do. Many mail programs will (rightly) block such images as they are used by spammers to test email accounts for liveness.
It's better to do (2). See PHP Email: Using Embedded Images in HTML Email. Basically you create a multi-part MIME email (so you can attach HTML and the images) and then reference them by cid instead of a true URL. These are far less suspicious to any mail program that receives them but obviously result in bigger emails (as the image might be sent 100,000 times instead of just sending a URL).

Answer 2

Have you inspected the HTML that gets echo'd out? You probably have the wrong image path. Also, if you're going to be emailing that, you need to use an absolute path (http://yoursite.com/images/theimage.jpg rather than images/theimage.jpg).
Also, make sure that you have the headers set up right in the mail() function so that it gets sent as HTML instead of plaintext.

Answer 3

You could also use a mail wrapper such as Swiftmailer or PHPMailer which may help you with your problem. You have said that you are on a time limit though, so it may take you longer to actually convert across to using something like this.

Answer 4

to echo the angle brackets use:
< //<=
> //>=
I think php can not deal with angle brackets as it is:
try the following:
$varone='one';
$vartwo='two';
$b=' <';
$concateOne='With Normal Brackets : '.$varone.'<'.$vartwo.'>'.'<br>';
$concateTwo='With Character Brackets : '.$varone.'<'.$vartwo.'>'.'<br>';
echo $concateOne;
echo '<br>';
echo $concateTwo;
echo '<hr>';
var_dump($concateOne);
echo '<hr>';
var_dump($concateTwo);
echo '<hr>';
when dumping the variable you will find that php do not store the value of the normal brackets.