The e-mail header from the online form is displayed incorrectly

Question

I have a questionnaire form on the web. After filling in this form, I send it to me by email, using the PHP function mail(). The form body and the data it contains, including the private message are displayed correctly on gmail.com. The problem, however, occurs in the header of the email itself. Some characters are displayed incorrectly. Here is a sample header:

$headers = "Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n";
$headers .= "From:" .$email . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply:" . $email . "\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP/". phpversion() . "\r\n" ;

Required display of email subject:

Nový dotaz -- námět, od Fořt Petr <p.fort1990@gmail.com>

Simultaneous displaying of the subject:

NovÃ½ dotaz -- nÃ¡mÄ☒t od: FoÅ☒t Petr <p.fort1990@gmail.com>

The squared times symbol is more like a rectangle.

Is anything wrong? Or where should I look for a mistake?

Please provide an example of characters which are displayed incorrectly. What is the expected output? Are they in the utf-8 charset? — LegendofPedro, Oct 27 '19 at 01:04
1) php version ? 2) Does your html page contains in the header section? 3) Does your form use the attribute accept-charset="xxxxxx" and what is the value ? — Eric, Oct 28 '19 at 20:42

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 27 '19 at 08:52

0

I'm not sure \r\n works on all platforms

see : Which line break in php mail header, \r\n or \n?

instead

("xxx\r\n\yyy");

use

Header('xxx');
Header('yyy');

or use PHP_EOL, not "\r\n"

answered Oct 27 '19 at 08:52

Eric

608
4
11

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 09 '20 at 09:44

Problem solved. My hosting provider uses different character encoding for the headers - I can't explain why, but the following php function will do it all.

function recode_to_utf8 ($text, $encoding = "utf-8")
{
    return "=?$encoding?Q?" . imap_8bit($text) . "?=";
}

And now all you have to do is send an email using the mail () method in combination with the method defined above recode_to_utf8(). Like this:

mail(recode_to_utf8($mail_to), recode_to_utf8($subject), recode_to_utf8($message), recode_to_utf8($headers));

I hope it helps others if they have the same problem as me.

The e-mail header from the online form is displayed incorrectly

2 Answers2