When people request info and use certain symbols through our online form, the email we recieve returns a bunch of #'s, letters, etc. For ex., if the word they use contains the and symbol (&), our email shows & in place of the &.
Is there anyway this could be fixed so that it shows what they actually typed in?
Thanks, I appreciate your help!
Those are called "[search]HTML entities[/search]". Certain characters that are reserved in web development languages, or that would cause confusion to web servers, or that cannot be typed directly on the keyboard, are encoded this way.
It is the responsibility of your server-side code to interpret and convert HTML entities back into text. Without knowing your server-side language, it's not possible to give you a concrete answer.
If you're using PHP, this page has the information you need.
It depends on the technology you use for your dynamic pages - is it PHP, ASP, JSP etc., however the problem lies elsewhere. Your form is being designed to encode the text in html format - this means that all characters that may have special meaning are encoded in this way. After the visitor of your site clicks the submit button, your server reads the contents of the form and sends an e-mail.
In my opinion the problem is that your mailing form encodes the e-mail message as plain text, so when you receive it your e-mail client (like Outlook) reads all characters as plain text and ignors the HTML meaning, that results in showing the special characters.
Please make sure that your server sends the messages in HTML format and that your mail client is not set to ignore HTML formatted messages and display them as text only.
The problem may be both in your client and your server mail formatting.
We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.