I had a need the other day to remove a char from the beginning of a string in PHP. Rather than fiddle around with the existing function substr(), I whipped up my own function that will remove X number of characters from the beginning of a string.

function removeXnumCharFromFront($instring,$x)
{
$length = strlen($instring);
for($i=$x; $i<$length; $i++) $temp[] = $instring[$i];
$comma_separated = implode(",", $temp);
$outstring = eregi_replace(",","",$comma_separated);
return $outstring;
}

Enjoy!

Here are headers for emailing through PHP’s mail() function:

$headers = “MIME-Version: 1.0rn”;
$headers .= “Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1rn”;
$headers .= ‘From: My Website <email@mywebsite.com>’;
if ($_POST[‘cc_sender’]) $headers.= “rnCC:”.$_POST[‘Email’].””;

I use this for all websites that I build, and I distribute my code for free as well. Formal information about this can be found at http://www.php.net/function.mail as well.

So I was pretty surprised when a standard contact form of mine came to me while testing with this as the “from”: ABC@osd2.myhostcenter.com. Why? Everything was set up properly. I contacted my host, and they insisted that I wasn’t entering “RFC compliant” headers. Their suggestion was to enter the from headers as ONLY an email.

Well, turns out, that’s not what I had to do. I had entered the company’s name with a comma, as in ABC, LLC. I removed the comma, and now the email works fine.

Here’s what the standards say:

3.6.2. Originator fields

   ...The from field consists of the field name "From" and a
   comma-separated list of one or more mailbox specifications...

I’m not sure what my comma was telling it to do, but now I know that commas are not allowed. I will be updating my PHP script to include this new information.