sending email w/ carriage returns, from textarea through query string

[spewn]

hello.

i've been at this all night, and i can't get it right.

i'm using AJAX, and i'm taking information from a form on an html page, a textarea to be specific.

the information in the TA gets formatted into a query string, then passed to a script which i parse and put the value in the subject area of the sendmail.

problem is, i can't seem to pass carriage returns.

here's my code:

script.pl?a=test%20subject&b=here%20we%20have%5Cna%20sentence%20or%20two%5Cn%5Cnsincerely,%5Cnadministrator

$esub=param('a');
$emsg=param('b');

open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t") || return 0;
select (MAIL);
print << "EOF";
To: Joe Blow <jb\@joeblow.com>
From: Administrator <admin\@mysite.com>
Subject: $esub
$emsg
EOF

close (MAIL);
select (STDOUT);

if i were to put the string "here we have\na sentence or two.\n\nsincerely,\nadministrator" it comes out in the email fine. but trying to pass the same sentence, complete with new lines from a variable, it prints the new lines literally.

i've tried unescaping the parameter:

$emsg = uri_unescape($emsg);

but that doesn't work either.

any ideas?

- g

 

[ishnid]

That's because you're passing %5Cn to the script, which is a literal backslash followed by an 'n' character. You want to URL-encode the newline character, which IIRC is %0a, though you'll want to check that.

 

[1DMF]

Before you make the AJAX call to the script , i'm assuming by JavaScript, as ishnid says, you need to encode the URL...

var lender = escape(document.getElementById('lender').value);[/quote] so I create JS vars which hold the escaped data and then do the ajax call with the vars.

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