literal $ character ?

Hi

i'm having trouble with reassigning a text variable that has $ in it

here's the example

$friendname = "John";
$bananaprice = 2233;
$pricelist = "The banana costs \$$bananaprice per a ton";

$message = "Dear $friendname \n";
$message .= "Below is the pricing you requested \n";
$message .= $pricelist;

mail("john@john.com", "banana price", $message);

PHP:

after sending this email, i get the following

so it eats up the literal $ character and the following 2 digits of the price .. instead of '$2233' it sends just '33'
also note, that if i simply do

echo $bananaprice;

PHP:

I will get the expected correct result saying that banana costs $2233 .. so it works with just echoing, but doesnt work when i re-assign the variable

any solution to this please ?

Thanks in advance

 

I put that exact coding into my own test file and had it email my email and it worked perfectly. If your email is really , I will run a test and make it email that email and you see if it's correct. Only difference we might have is I'm running PHP5, I believe. You could always try (which you should always do, anyways) putting { } around it such as

$pricelist = "The banana costs \${$bananaprice} per a ton";

PHP:

but I see no problems with that script.

 

my server runs on php4

lemme try the brackets and post an update quick

 

ok .. my bad ..

i did some further investigation and the problem is not in the steps that i brought above, but in the next step (still need help with it)

so the actual code is like this

$friendname = "John";
$bananaprice = 2233;
$pricelist = "The banana costs \$$bananaprice per a ton";

$message = "Dear $friendname \n";
$message .= "Below is the pricing you requested \n";
$message .= $pricelist;

$template = file_get_contents("emailtemplate.html");
$template = preg_replace("^CONTENT^", $message, $template);

mail("john@john.com", "banana price", $template);

PHP:

so the problem is when i put that $message thing as a "replace with" in preg_replace function..

any thoughts please ?

i know i can simply put all the content of emailtemplate.html inside my PHP and manually put the $message into it, but that's the "not good" way to do it .. so i wanna avoid it

 

Can you show me what emailtemplate.html looks like? Why do you have to use preg_replace instead of just str_replace? I think the problem is because preg_replace can take $# and replace it with whatever is in sub classes in your search string. I think for some reason it's trying to replace $22 with the 22nd subclass you have in your search string, which doesn't exist, as you don't have any subclasses anyways. What you can do is put \\\$ in the $pricelist definition so that it actually turns into \$2233 in the end and not just $2233 (and hopefully preg_replace will escape it with that \).

 

the emailtemplate.html is a simple HTML template something like

<header code goes here with styles and everything>
CONTENT
<footer code goes here>

 

I'd never use

$pricelist = "The banana costs \$$bananaprice per a ton";

PHP:

I'd use:

$pricelist = "The banana costs \$".$bananaprice." per a ton";

PHP:

The echo works for me, not sure about mail() though.

 

Just use single quotes and escape concenate it,

$bill = 123;
$name = 'Glen';

$message = 'The bill is $'.$bill." $name";
mail('youremail@email.com', 'Subject', $message) or die ("Mail error");
echo 'Mail Sent';

PHP:

 

I don't think any of those suggestions they gave you will work, because it's not the inserting that is ruining it, it has to be the preg_replace.

Just use str_replace since you're only replacing one instance of CONTENT and it's not like it's a hard string to replace, don't need regular expressions.

str_replace("CONTENT", $message, $template);

PHP:

EDIT: Or, use my other suggestion.

$friendname = "John";
$bananaprice = 2233;
$pricelist = "The banana costs \\\$$bananaprice per a ton";

$message = "Dear $friendname \n";
$message .= "Below is the pricing you requested \n";
$message .= $pricelist;

$template = file_get_contents("emailtemplate.html");
$template = preg_replace("^CONTENT^", $message, $template);

mail("john@john.com", "banana price", $template);

PHP:

That extra \ in the $pricelist, which will then be in the $message, will help to escape the $ when it's thrown into preg_replace

 

str_replace helped

Thanks !