Someone please help me!

[cboscia]

Hi, I have made my company website in Adobe Muse (please don't throw things at me). It can be found at this link: http://www.inspirecreativeworks.com. I made a form on the Contact page using HTML, and it looks exactly like I needed it to look. I was told in order to make the form send the info to my email address, I had to script some php. If you fill out the form, it gives me this error:

 

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in /home/content/i/n/s/inspire/html/send_form_email.php on line 4

 

I know nothing about php. I have attached two files. One is a simple text file so you can see the html of the actual form. The other is a.php file with my code in it. The idea here is to get the info from the form sent to my email address, AND black spam from getting into my email and such. I was told that code is also in my php doc. 

 

So the question is why isn't this working? Any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated. And if the php is just totally off, can someone supply a link to a php script that WOULD work?

 

Thank you and please, be gentle! 

Chris

html.rtf

send_form_email.php

[lemmin]

You can actually make an HTML form send the data to an email address by setting the action attribute to a mailto link:

<form action="mailto:email@aol.com">

As far as your error. I don't see anything syntactically wrong on line 4. I think the error might actually be from unexpected whitespace characters, possibly from the editor you used.

[davidannis]

I opened the file and you do have a white space character that sows up at the beginning of lines as a little cross in my IDE when I display whitespace.

[davidannis]

You can actually make an HTML form send the data to an email address by setting the action attribute to a mailto link:

<form action="mailto:email@aol.com">

As far as your error. I don't see anything syntactically wrong on line 4. I think the error might actually be from unexpected whitespace characters, possibly from the editor you used.

I have heard that the mailto: action type is not always reliable and the reasoning makes sense to me. I often use computers that don't have a mail client configured.

[cboscia]

So does anyone know what code WOULD work for this to be effective? I have heard the mailto command does work, but it is not secure and your email will be overrun by spam, getting hundreds of emails daily.

[lemmin]

As mentioned, your code seems to be fine. You need to get rid of all the strange whitespace characters. What text editor did you save the PHP file with?

[cboscia]

I copied the code and pasted into TextEdit on a mac, then pasted it into Dreamweaver. How do I see these white spaces?

[lemmin]

It looks like it is a multibyte UTF-8 encoded character (xA0 non-breaking space). If you have the ability in one of your text editors to change the encoding to UTF-8, you should be able to see them and replace them.

[cboscia]

Ok, that's like a different language to me. So let's try this... attached is a screen shot of the code, opened in Dreamweaver. Can you tell me what to delete in each line? And keep in mind, I have no idea what UTF-8 or an xA0 non breaking space is.

 

Thanks!

[cboscia]

Sorry, here is the attachment...
 

[davidannis]

if you delete the leading whitespace on the lines with red on the left (and then reformat just to make it readable) it should be OK I think.

[davidannis]

I did it for you

send_form_email1.php

[lemmin]

These characters are actually on EVERY line, not just the red ones. Davidannis is right though; delete all the whitespace in front of every line and use spaces or tabs to format it the way you want.

[cboscia]

davidannis - You are the fucking man. It worked. Thank you VERY much! 

[ignace]

So does anyone know what code WOULD work for this to be effective? I have heard the mailto command does work, but it is not secure and your email will be overrun by spam, getting hundreds of emails daily.

If your form isn't protected it won't make any difference whether they mail to you directly or through your form.

 

Also I can send your form by simply making requests to:

 

send_form_email.php?email=t@t.t

Put that in a loop and call it say 99999999999999 times? You are gonna have one lovely inbox. Edited April 16, 2013 by ignace

[cboscia]

ignace - I heard the same thing. However, putting the   $field=filter_var($field, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

 

 command in there doesn't stop it?

[cboscia]

davidannis - This works now like I said, but when I get the email, it only shows the content of the message. Is there a way I can have it show the name, company name and phone number as well?

 

Thanks!

[lemmin]

The variables like $_REQUEST['email'] correspond directly to the "name" attributes of your input elements on your form. You can get the values of these by using that name in the $_REQUEST variable just like the others:

$message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;
$message .= "\r\nTelephone:" . $_REQUEST['telephone'];

[davidannis]

If you just want a secure formmail script, I would suggest using http://www.tectite.com/ instead of coding it yourself.

[cboscia]

Lemmin - I did that and the form still works, but nothing is displayed except the message. What's wrong with this? See attached...

send_form_email.php

[jcbones]

See if this works for you:

 

 
<?php
session_start();
function spamcheck($field)
  {
  $field=filter_var($field, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
 
  if(filter_var($field, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) && empty($_SESSION['mail_sent']))
    {
$_SESSION['mail_sent'] = 1;
    return TRUE;
    }
  else
    {
    return FALSE;
    }
  }
 
if (isset($_REQUEST['email']))
  {
  $mailcheck = spamcheck($_REQUEST['email']);
  if ($mailcheck==FALSE)
    {
    echo "Invalid input";
    }
  else
    {
    $name = $_REQUEST['name'] ;
    $company_name = $_REQUEST['company name'] ;
    $email = $_REQUEST['email'] ;
    $telephone = $_REQUEST['telephone'] ;
    $message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;
$content = <<<EOF
Name: {$name}
Company: {$company_name}
Email: {$email}
Telephone: {$telephone}
-------------------------------------------------------
{$message}
EOF;
 
mail("cboscia@inspirecreativeworks.com", "I am interested in Inspire Creative Works $subject",
    $content, "From: $email" );
    echo "Thank you for using our mail form";
    }
  }
else
  {
  echo "<form method='post' action='send_form_email.php'>
  Email: <input name='email' type='text'><br>
  Subject: <input name='subject' type='text'><br>
  Message:<br>
  <textarea name='message' rows='15' cols='40'>
  </textarea><br>
  <input type='submit'>
  </form>";
  }
?>

[cboscia]

Jesus christ. Now it says invalid input when I filled the form out. It worked the first time I used it, now it doesn't.

[davidannis]

It will say invalid input if you try to send it twice because of the spam check. If you close and reopen your browser you'll get a new session and it will let you send again.

[ignace]

ignace - I heard the same thing. However, putting the   $field=filter_var($field, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

 

 command in there doesn't stop it?

Try it. And no you are only verifying it's e-mail-ish. It does nothing against making sure the script isn't executed repeatedly or sending mass mails.

[ignace]

If you close and reopen your browser you'll get a new session and it will let you send again.

Which won't help secure your form, a script doesn't have cookies/sessions, so you are only blocking any users that may want to send you a second e-mail. A bot will still simply send out a million mails.

Edited April 17, 2013 by ignace