What are the best practices for handling form data in PHP to ensure proper formatting and display in emails?

When handling form data in PHP for email submissions, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent any malicious code injection. Additionally, formatting the data properly before sending it in the email ensures that it displays correctly for the recipient. Using PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize user input and nl2br() to convert new lines to HTML line breaks can help ensure proper formatting and display in emails. 

// Sanitize form data
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = htmlspecialchars($_POST['email']);
$message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']);

// Format data for email display
$message = nl2br($message);

// Send email
$to = "recipient@example.com";
$subject = "New Form Submission";
$body = "Name: $name <br>Email: $email <br>Message: $message";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: sender@example.com' . "\r\n";

mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

Keywords

form data PHP formatting display emails

Related Questions