Phpmailer: UTF-8 html email

Created on 22 Mar 2017 · 21Comments · Source: PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Hello,

I'm using PHPMailer to send html emails.
I use Twig template engine to parse _POST data.

I followed your documentation to enable UTF8 but I still received email with specials characters that haven't been decoded.

Here is my mailer class:

Mailer Class based on PHPMailer

I maybe do something wrong? Any idea...

Source

jimblue

Most helpful comment

That header has no effect on email at all. You're already doing the only thing that PHPMailer requires for UTF-8 to work:

$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';

You will need to do the MySQL names setting too. If it's still not looking correct, it means your handling of the data is not preserving the UTF-8 encoding. If you find that static template text is correct but dynamic data from MySQL is not, then you know where the problem is.

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

👍14 ❤4

All 21 comments

Try putting:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); at first line of code (page).
Also if you content get from MySQL datadabase,
you need to define after connection:
$conn->query("set names 'utf8'"); $conn->set_charset("utf8");

r0073rr0r on 22 Mar 2017

Hello @r0073rr0r ,

Should I put header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); on the email template or on index.php ?

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

Headers allways goes at first lines of code in index.php
But i thinks if you grab from MySQL you need to define names and charset.

r0073rr0r on 22 Mar 2017

I don't use MySQL, it's flatfile system. Let me try your solution on index.php then :)

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

That header has no effect on email at all. You're already doing the only thing that PHPMailer requires for UTF-8 to work:

$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

👍14 ❤4

If you're not using MySQL it suggests that your template file's encoding is incorrect.

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

👍1

Ok @Synchro, make sens, so the problem come probably from twig ?

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

👍1

Perhaps - you'll probably need to tell twig it should be using UTF-8. It's quite easy to spot UTF-8 data if you hex-dump it - having it look correct isn't reliable as it might be showing you the right chars in the wrong charset.

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

Hum okay 😄

Thanks for the hint, I'll make some tests

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

So... I've made a var_dump on $content witch is the email template rendered by Twig with _$POST data.

Here is the head of the response.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">
<head>
  <title>New message from Élodie Bérangère</title>
  <!--[if !mso]><!-- -->
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <!--<![endif]-->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

As you can see the title contain the name from _$POST data and accent are looking good.

Just after that I use this rendered template ($content ) as PHPMailer Body but I still see character like é in the email I receive.

Really don't understand what's happening

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

Try:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  <title>New message from Élodie Bérangère</title>
  <!--[if !mso]><!-- -->
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
  <!--<![endif]-->

According to W3 tags should be:
Meta charset
Title
Meta name="descripition"
Meta name="keywords"
Stylesheet
JavaScript Files

Maybe HTML4 have problems, try changing to HTML5 instead.

I dont know what can else be a problem.

r0073rr0r on 22 Mar 2017

Text like é is HTML entity encoding, which allows you to embed non-ascii chars in ascii text. PHPMailer will have no effect on that. As I said, having it _look_ correct doesn't tell you much, you need to check the underlying data to be sure - for example é is e9 in ISO-8859-1, but is c3a9 in UTF-8 - you can't tell which you're using without hex-dumping the text. Just because your source file _says_ it's UTF-8 doesn't mean it's true!

Seeing those Microsoft tags in your doctype is an extremely bad sign. Steer well clear of any HTML generated by Word, it's truly terrible. That said, the doctype you're using is already HTML5.

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

A little improvement

with _$POST =

c'est chiânt les accents ça fou le bordel évidement

email look like this =

c'est vraiment chiânt les accents ça fou le bordel évidement

So quote and maybe some others characters still don't work.

Does it help you to understand what could be the problem.

PS : Thanks for your help guys and sorry if I sound newby, coding is not my job.
I try my best to understand you. (you lost me in your last comment @Synchro 😕 )

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

About html email formating I'm using the very popular MJML framework witch is apparently the best.

MJML GITHUB

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

Found the solution
I had to use Twig flag raw on each $_POST data in Twig template.

from

{{ postdata.firstname}}

{{ postdata.firstname|raw}}

Thanks @Synchro and @r0073rr0r to show me the path... 🚶

😃

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

👍1

Yes, that would explain the HTML entities - Twig escapes output by default. Be careful with raw option though - make sure you have validated/sanitized inputs before passing them to your template to be used unfiltered!

Synchro on 22 Mar 2017

👍1

@Synchro yep, everything is validated and sanitized before template is parsed.
Thanks for the tips again ;)

jimblue on 22 Mar 2017

Hello everyone
How to send an email via PHPMailer but instead of send as rendered html, user get a email with content of $message as a HTML file?

bahmanian on 17 Oct 2018

When you send HTML email, the message body is an HTML file; it is rendered by the client.

Synchro on 17 Oct 2018

Thanks for the answer. I found a solution to fix my problem.

bahmanian on 17 Oct 2018

👍1

That header has no effect on email at all. You're already doing the only thing that PHPMailer requires for UTF-8 to work:
$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';
You will need to do the MySQL names setting too. If it's still not looking correct, it means your handling of the data is not preserving the UTF-8 encoding. If you find that static template text is correct but dynamic data from MySQL is to, then you know where the problem is.

You saved my day