Htmlspecialchars for email content

PHP
1

hi all

I have this below code for textarea in which person enters his enquiry


$body="Hi \
<br><br>".htmlspecialchars($name). " had sent you enquiry . ".  " \
<br><br>
Person Enquiry = ". htmlspecialchars($enquiry) . " \
<br><br> ";
mail($to,$body);

after person enters enquiry the email is sent with the enquiry entered.

i receive enquiry content as


yo man\\r\
\\r\
testing new site\\r\
\\r\
stay tuned\\r\
\\r\
vineet

how can i use htmlspecialchars in the way it doesnt echoes \r
\r\

vineet

2

htmlspecialchars() is for escaping HTML output.

If your email is displaying that text as part of an HTML email then those characters will not be visible.

if you are providing that as a plain text email then you need to get rid of the htmlspecialchars() call so as to not convert it from plain text.

3

felgall is right, but perhaps you were wanting to use http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php (to remove html tags) instead of htmlspecialchars() but that isn’t necessary in a mail() function, at least I don’t think there’s a security breach possible. Removing html tags is mostly when you want to output user input (not safe) on your webpage.