HTML email showing <td width="xx"> code

[matte]

This happens from time to time and it really drives me crazy.  I cannot get the problem to reproduce, although I have plenty of evidence that it is happening.  I have a php page that pulls in some database from mssql formats it in a nice table then send via email to a 3rd party.  All of that works great.  What happens is in some of the emails the first column will show the table cell information for the next column.  See example:

 

Mascaw	              Mar. 8, 2012 - 6:15 pm	          Ronnie Johnson
Newtown Pike<td width="150">       Mar. 8, 2012 - 6:15 pm 	          Todd Doe
Hall of Justice	      Mar. 8, 2012 - 6:15 pm	          Carol French

 

I had this problem before with another emailing system and found that wrapping the email to 900 before sending it out fixed it.  I wrapped this with $message = wordwrap($message, 900, "\n", true);  but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

 

Anyone ran into this before?  Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

 

 

[ManiacDan]

It's probably breaking in the middle of your tag.  Insert newlines yourself, don't rely on wordwrap.

[DavidAM]

$message = wordwrap($message, 900, "\n", true);

 

The "true" parameter forces the break at 900 (in this case). If this parameter is "false" it will find a space to break on. So, it could be breaking in the middle of a tag name or attribute name or value. (whitespace inside a tag is not significant unless it breaks a name or value)

 

The RFC specifies <CRLF> as the line break. Most mail systems probably handle <LF> alone, but there may be some that do not. You might consider wrapping it with "\r\n".

 

When generating HTML for a mail message (or for a web page, for that matter), I always stick in line-feeds at the end of blocks and so forth -- so, after </P>, </TR>, </DIV>, even </TD> if the rows are long), then I wordwrap() to about 70. wordwrap() seems to honor the line-feeds that are already present and just adds new ones (like for long paragraphs).

 

Other Considerations:

• You really need to take a look at the source of the message -- either write it to a file or CC yourself on the email.
  
• Find out what mail client is being used when this happens, is it always the same one or does this happen across multiple clients?
  
• Is it possible that a value in a cell actually contains HTML special characters? Be sure to run the values through htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() to prevent data from scrambling the page.
  

[matte]

great, I will try these suggestions and try to report back.  Sometimes it might go 2 months before it happens again so it might be a while before i report back.  Thanks for the suggestions guys!