PHP mail contact form issue with accented characters

Question

I'm having an issue with accented characters sent from my simple HTML contact form. When I recieve an email, which contains some accented characters(ľ,š,č,ť,ž,ý,á,í,é,ú,ä,ô,...) it's just unreadable. I see it's pretty common issue but I still was not able to implement solutions that have already been answered to my PHP.

I set up the meta tag for utf-8 already into <head> of HTML and I also tried to input header into PHP file, but honestly I'm not realy sure where exactly should he be placed.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

Here is code of my form:

<form name="contactForm" method="POST" action="mail_sender.php">
                                            <div class="row">
                                                <!--NAME-->
                                                <div class="control-group col-md-6 col-sm-6">
                                                    <label class="control-label" for="inputName">MENO<sup>*</sup></label>
                                                    <div class="controls">
                                                        <input class="form-control" name="name" type="text" placeholder="meno">
                                                    </div>
                                                </div>
                                            </div>
                                            <div class="row">
                                                <!--EMAIL-->
                                                <div class="control-group col-md-6 col-sm-6">
                                                    <label class="control-label" for="inputEmail">EMAIL<sup>*</sup></label>
                                                    <div class="controls">
                                                        <input name="email" type="text" class="form-control col-md-4 col-sm-4" placeholder="email">
                                                    </div>
                                                </div>
                                            </div>
                                            <div id='contactForm_errorloc'></div>
                                            <div class="row">
                                                <!--PHONE-->
                                                <div class="control-group col-md-6 col-sm-6">
                                                    <label class="control-label" for="inputEmail">TELEFÓN<sup>*</sup></label>
                                                    <div class="controls">
                                                        <input name="phone" type="text" class="form-control col-md-4 col-sm-4" placeholder="telefónne číslo">
                                                    </div>
                                                </div>
                                            </div>
                                            <div class="row">
                                                <!--MESSAGE-->
                                                <div class="control-group col-md-12 col-sm-12">
                                                    <label for="textarea" class="control-label">SPRÁVA<sup>*</sup></label>
                                                    <div class="controls">
                                                        <textarea class="form-control" name="message" rows="4" id="textarea"></textarea>
                                                    </div>
                                                </div>
                                            </div>
                                            <div id='contactForm_errorloc'></div>
                                            <div class="control-group form-button-offset">
                                                <input style="margin-top: 10px;" type="submit" class="btn btn-default" value="Poslať správu" />
                                            </div>
                                        </form>

Here's code of my PHP file:

<?php 
$errors = '';
$myemail = 'email@domain.com';//<-----Put Your email address here.
if(empty($_POST['name'])  || 
   empty($_POST['email']) ||
   empty($_POST['phone']) ||
   empty($_POST['message']))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: all fields are required";
}

$name = $_POST['name']; 
$email_address = $_POST['email'];
$phone = $_POST['phone']; 
$message = $_POST['message']; 

if (!preg_match(
"/^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$/i", 
$email_address))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: Invalid email address";
}

if( empty($errors))
{
 $to = $myemail; 
 $email_subject = "Contact form submission: $name";
 $email_body = "You have received a new message. ".
 " Here are the details:\n Name: $name \n Email: $email_address \n Phone: $phone \n Message \n $message";   
 
$headers = "From: $myemail\n"; 
$headers .= "Reply-To: $email_address";

 
 mail($to,$email_subject,$email_body,$headers);
 //redirect to the 'thank you' page
 header('Location: contact-form-thank-you.html');
} 
?>
 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> 
<html>
<head>
 <title>Contact form handler</title>
</head>

<body>
<!-- This page is displayed only if there is some error -->
<?php
echo nl2br($errors);
?>


</body>
</html>

I tried many things to make it work without success. Thank you for your time, I'll appreciate your answers.

Yes, but it's not on the client side im pretty sure, since its not readable on any platform(mobile, etc.). — dvglsk, Jul 29 '15 at 19:11
Try adding `"Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"` to your mail header. And use `\r\n` instead of `\n`. Change `text/html` to `text/plain` if you are not sending html mail. — frz3993, Jul 29 '15 at 19:15
@frz3993 already tried to add something like this: header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8'); but it wasn't working...any idea where exactly to put it? — dvglsk, Jul 29 '15 at 19:23
Your mail header, the `$headers` is what I'm talking about. `$headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8";` The `header()` function sends raw http header. Use `\r\n` to separate the headers. — frz3993, Jul 29 '15 at 19:26
@fzr3993 I tried both earlier today, but without much success. — dvglsk, Jul 29 '15 at 19:30
@chris85 I dont think it's a duplicate because like I said i tried to implement quite a few solutions into this and I couldnt make it work so I'm more looking for something like piece of code that will make this exact form work. PHP is not my strongest side :). — dvglsk, Jul 29 '15 at 19:37
`$headers = "From: $myemail\r\n";`,`$headers .= "Reply-To: $email_address\r\n";`,`$headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\r\n";` Like this? — frz3993, Jul 29 '15 at 19:50
At what point at the accented characters lost. On form submission? when sending the email? when reading the email? — chris85, Jul 29 '15 at 20:05

PHP mail contact form issue with accented characters

0 Answers0