Send emails from a template with PHP
When you're designing your web application, you'll find that various actions require that an email be sent off. It's easy to hard-code the email into the script. For example, in a tech support web application, you may want to send an email when a user submits a ticket, and another email alerting them of any replies.
But what happens when you have many different emails to send, and they deliver a lot of different, complex information. Then it gets too difficult to maintain many different lines of code for different emails. It's easier to create a generic email template class, and then as many templates as you want. Here's how!
Here's the template class:
var $template;
var $variables;
function Template($template){
$this->template = @file_get_contents($template);
$this->resetVars();
}
function resetVars(){
$this->variables = array();
}
function Add($var_name, $var_data){
$this->variables[$var_name] = $var_data;
}
function AddArray($array){
if ( !is_array($array) ){
return;
}
foreach ( $array as $name => $data ){
$this->Add($name, $data);
}
return;
}
function Evaluate($direct_output = false){
$template = addslashes($this->template);
foreach ( $this->variables as $variable => $data ){
$$variable = $data;
}
eval("\$template = \"$template\";");
if ( $direct_output ) {
echo stripslashes($template);
} else {
return stripslashes($template);
}
}
}
Here's the code where you'll choose the template file, get whatever variables (username, order, etc) from the database, and merge it with the template file to send in the email.
$template_file = 'templates/confirm_order.tpl';
$template =& new Template($template_file);
// here you need to get the user's specific data from a database, and dump it into a resultset called $result
$from = "admin@domain.com";
$to = "user's email address";
foreach ( $result as $data ){
$template->resetVars();
$template->AddArray($data);
$output = $template->Evaluate();
mail( $from, $to, $output );
}
And here's an example template file:
Product : {$product}
Url : {$url}
Price : {$price}
Description : {$description}
Category : {$category}
Contact name: {$contact_name}
Email : {$email}
Regards,
Company Name
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