What are some common pitfalls to avoid when attempting to create visually appealing HTML emails with CSS using PHP?

One common pitfall when creating visually appealing HTML emails with CSS using PHP is not inline styling your CSS. Email clients often strip out or ignore external stylesheets, so it's important to inline your CSS to ensure your styles are applied correctly. To do this, you can use PHP to read your CSS file and inject the styles directly into your HTML elements.

$css = file_get_contents('styles.css');
$html = file_get_contents('email_template.html');

$patterns = array();
$replacements = array();

$patterns[] = '/<style.*?>.*?<\/style>/s';
$replacements[] = '';

$patterns[] = '/<link.*?rel="stylesheet".*?>/s';
$replacements[] = '';

$html = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $html);
$html = preg_replace('/<\/?head>/', '', $html);

$styled_html = '<style>' . $css . '</style>' . $html;

echo $styled_html;