PHP Mail

Use addslashes() to escape all your quotes with slashes.  They will not appear in the email, as PHP requires quotations be escaped in strings.

$body = "First Name".addslashes($firstname);

So that will escapte quotations periods and single quotes?

Now what about other odd chars like ; for example?
How do i strip that?

addslashes() will add the escape character '\' to only single quotes, double quotes, and backslashes (escaping itself). There's no need to escape any other character for handling strings within PHP.  If you're just sending $body to the mail function, you don't need to worry about periods or semicolons doing anythink malicious.

If you were passing your string along to a SQL query or outputting for display in an HTML page on the other hand, then you'd have reason to be concerned.  PHP provides mysql_real_escape_string() and htmlspecialchars() to handle each of these cases.  If you desire to remove or replace additional "odd" characters, you'd be able to use str_replace() or ereg_replace() to do the job...

Stip slashes is not working.  anywhere there is a ' " it adds a \ in the email.

Well, yes, addslashes() will add a backslash to any quote found...  The idea is to addslashes() to ensure that quotes are not misinterpreted by php as the end of a string...  then pass stripslashes($body) to your mail function as the body parameter rather than simply $body alone

ahh I got ya
Let me give that a try.

I want the ' " to display in the email.  So passing the stripslashes($body), send that out in the body of the email?

I might add, PHP automatically applies addslashes() all input values submitted from forms.  So you only need to remove them on the receiving end.

Specifically, what sort of problems are you running into?  IE detail what behavior are you seeing that is not to your liking...  If you simply want to eliminate all quotes and periods from body, run this:

$body = preg_replace( "/(\.|\'|\"+?)/", "", $body );

Yes, stripslashes($body) will remove all the escaped quotation characters from $body... hopefully you'll start seeing the results you expect.

Ok just for clairfication this is how I would like it to work.

Customer enters in hight  5'11  or 5"11

Now when the email is sent out I want the email to appear exactily as the end user entered it in as.

So how would I stip the chars and re-add the stiped chars back in when the mail is sent?

OK let me give that A try.