Manipulating Textarea

[johnnyg24]

I have an email function that takes text from a textarea and uses that as the body of the email. I would like to send customers text copies of their purchase orders, very similar to many online purchase confirmations. I am hesitant to send html formated emails. I would like to insert data into the textarea to mimic what a html table would look like. For example:

ITEM			 QTY		  PRICE======================================red shirt		2			  $10.00blue shirt	   1			  $5.00

*(not sure if the above table will even show up right on this forum)I am having problems with inserting spaces to organize all the data into columns.Any advice or possible other solutions would be helpful. Thanks.

[jeffman]

1. Don't work with spaces. My email client defaults to a proportionate font like Times or something, so the spaces would never line up. All you'd have is a mess. I'm sure it would be that way for many, even most, people.2. This could work with tabs, in theory. But again, tab positioning depends on character size. You'll still end up with misaligned items.3. So I don't think this is a good solution.

[johnnyg24]

I never thought about the text sizing. Although wouldn't the tabs take care of all that as long as i use one font size in the entire email? If not, do you have any suggestions as to send a text email that could be set up as a html table?

[jeffman]

You can be pretty sure, but not absolutely sure, that an email client will honor the rich text style you format your mail in.How are you sending this data, btw? Going through PHP or something?

[Synook]

Why are you afraid of HTML emails?

[johnnyg24]

I am using ASP. I send the data via AJAX to a Windows BLAT email program.

[jeffman]

Sadly, I don't ASP. We have a few experts who might be able to help you format your message. Better yet, Google something like ASP mail html. Generally, the only trick is getting your initial headers correct. The exact sequence of newline characters usually matters. Or maybe BLAT does that for you?