escaping inside mail() to add html

[theredking]

I'm a little stuck. I am new to this, so it is undoubtedly down to something I clearly do not understand.

 

I'm using mail() and am trying to email the contents of a form. I can do this successfully until I try and make what is emailed from that form a little more complicated. Right now I have:

mail( "[email protected]", "This is a test",
		 "Message goes here", 
	 "From:$first_name $last_name <$email>\r\nContent-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii");

 

This works as it should. In my

"Message goes here",

section I have listed the vars and text, as you might expect, and I am formatting it very basically with simple tags for line break, and strong text etc. The problem I have comes when I am trying to have it send the results of a number of checkboxes. I had a similar problem the other day, and when this problem arose I was offered this code:

foreach ($_POST['checkboxname'] as $value) {
echo "$value " ;
}

 

This worked fine, but I cannot get it to work within my page that has mail() in it. I'm sure this is not right, but I put this entire code inline where I wanted the checkbox array to be displayed. Should I put

foreach ($_POST['checkboxname'] as $value)

somewhere else, and then just reference the array with $value inside the mail() code with the other variables? I did try this, but it didn't work for some reason.

 

My other thought was to escape out of

"Message goes here",

and just put html code in, but if I do this, I get no message content at all.

 

I know I'm in over my head here, is there a solution? I'm slowly learning this...

 

Thank you in anticipation...