PHP-and-MySQL/C4/Sending-Email-Part-2/English-timed

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Time Narration
00:00 Okay, so we have created our HTML form here and determined that the data has been processed through the POST variable when our form has been submitted.
00:12 The next thing I'll do is just check some conditions on this, just for the sake of the tutorial.
00:22 I'll say if the string length...
00:25 No, first of all I'll check for existence. So if $name and $message,
00:30 this is just saying does this exist and does this exist because as long as they do, they will always have a True value.
00:38 And we are using the "AND" operator (&&) here which says "is this true AND is this true".
00:45 If this is TRUE, we will execute the code here.
00:49 Otherwise I want to kill this script and I'll say "You must enter a name and message".
01:04 And may be just underline that for effect.
01:07 And inside our block of the code, if this is TRUE we will perform another check.
01:14 So, here we have checked with an existence check.
01:20 And now here what we will do is run another check.
01:25 How can I word it? I'll do a length check. So I will comment this as length check.
01:32 We will say $name or rather the length of the string using the string-length function.
01:40 We check if this string-length function of '$name' is greater - no, lesser or equal to our 'max length' which is '20'. We can have any number here.
01:55 And the string-length of '$message' is lesser or equal to 300 characters. Obviously, you can have any number here, too.
02:12 Then we will execute this block of code.
02:16 Otherwise we will say "Max length for name is 20 and max length for message is 300".
02:30 Obviously a good thing to do is to store 300 and 20 in variables.
02:36 Let's set them here. So, you can say "$namelen" equals 20 and you can say "$messagelen" equals to 300.
02:47 Then what you can do is, incorporate this here. So "$namelen" there.... oooops so "$namelen" there
02:55 and here you could say - oh! let's put that back - and here you can say "$messagelen".
03:04 Down here too, replace these. So, these will be dynamically replaced if you are performing the check.
03:12 So, here you say "$messagelen".
03:15 So, let's test this out. The "namelen" is maximum 20 characters. So, here we can only enter a maximum of 20 characters. So, Alex here.
03:26 In Message, I'll enter some text, more than 300 characters long. I'll just copy paste this along.
03:33 That should be more than 300 characters now.
03:38 So, if I click on Send me this button, we get the message - "The max length of the name is 20..." that's the variable that's been put here.
03:49 And the maximum length for this is 300; that's another variable that's taken from here.
03:56 We are taking the check and echoing out this variable as well.
04:02 Presuming that everything is okay we are going to get the email sent to the user.
04:07 I keep stressing this, it's the address here and we've already got our subject line here.
04:13 Perhaps we could bring these down here; there is no point setting a variable if the email is not ready to send.
04:20 So, this is our 'setup variables'. We also have the...
04:32 we could say "from" but this is similar to the email address.
04:38 So, we got the "name" already and all we really need is the "message" which again is here.
04:46 We also need some header information which I'll show you soon but I'll head straight to the "mail function".
04:58 The "mail function" is as follows - mail and the first variable you need to include is who this message is "to". So I'll type $to.
05:11 Then the subject of the email which is just $subject.
05:15 It's here. Then we have the body of the email, so $body.
05:20 Here we will say $body equals the following - "This is an email from $name". So we have included the '$name' inside the body of the email.
05:36 Then, just use backslash n (\n) which is new line, so that's 2 new lines.
05:42 Next, we will echo out the '$message' which will be included in this.
05:49 So, our '$body' consists of a generic message here, the user's name that we have processed in the form and then two new lines and next we have entered the '$message' that has been entered in our form here. Okay?
06:03 So, let's get rid of these.
06:06 That looks good to go.
06:09 As a 'mail function', you may think how that would work but sending email php is quite easy.
06:21 But when we do actually send the email, we can see that there are some problems.
06:27 We have got a warning - "the mail() function "send mail_from" is not set in 'php dot ini' or custom "From:" header missing".
06:36 I have not set the "send mail from" in my 'ini'. I missed that. So I'll do it manually.
06:44 After we have done this, we'll run into another error as well.
06:48 I will teach you how to fix it but in the next part of the video.
06:52 In the next part, we'll deal with anymore errors we get after that.
06:56 So join me in the next part. Bye for now. This is Evan Varkey, dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial Project.

Contributors and Content Editors

Gaurav, Gyan, Pratik kamble, Sandhya.np14