BACKGROUND: I am setting up an email verification routine that receives $_POST data from a form and sends a confirmation email to the applicant with a verification link. The form and the PHP processing routines that store the $_POST data in a MySQL database, and that send out the confirmation email in text format are contained in the same document. The HTML formatted confirmation email is contained in an external file and is included using the following PHP-Mailer method:
$mail->msgHTML(file_get_contents('../../confirmation_mail.html'), dirname(__FILE__));
GOAL: Include in the external HTML file information obtained from the $_POST variable before the email is sent.
WHAT DOES NOT APPEAR TO WORK: I have tried placing statements similar to
<?php echo "blah, blah, blah" . $variable_name . "blah, blah, blah"; ?>
in the external file in the hope that the value of $variable_name would be read into the file before it is sent. Unfortunately, this does not work.
ANY SUGGESTIONS?