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Bug #47868 Special apostrophe character stripped from subject
Submitted: 2009-04-01 21:30 UTC Modified: 2014-01-23 18:48 UTC
Votes:2
Avg. Score:2.0 ± 1.0
Reproduced:2 of 2 (100.0%)
Same Version:2 (100.0%)
Same OS:2 (100.0%)
From: cconnors at online-buddies dot com Assigned:
Status: Not a bug Package: Mail related
PHP Version: 5.2.9 OS: win32 only - XPSP2
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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 [2009-04-01 21:30 UTC] cconnors at online-buddies dot com 
Description:
------------
The following character (?) is automatically stripped from a subject, but not the body using mail().

Quick fix is...

$subj = str_replace('?', '\'', $template->getSubject());

But it's not EXACTLY the same character.

I've played around with the header, and cannot get it to work with UTF-8.


Reproduce code:
---------------
header = "From: ". 'noreply' . 
	    " <" . 'noreply@foo.net' . ">\n" . 
	    "Reply-To: " . 'noreply@foo.net' . "\n" . 
	    "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n\n";

mail('fake@foo.net', 'french d?avoir' , 'french d?avoir', $header);

Expected result:
----------------
Should get a message with:

subject: french d?avoir
body: french d?avoir

Actual result:
--------------
Actually get: 

subject: french davoir
body: french d?avoir

Patches

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AllCommentsChangesGit/SVN commitsRelated reports
 [2012-07-06 20:36 UTC] astewart at online-buddies dot com 
This is not a bug.

The header field must be encoded if you want non-ASCII characters in it, as in:


Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?french d=92avoir?=
 [2012-07-06 20:38 UTC] astewart at online-buddies dot com 
Actually, that's not ISO-8859-1, that's Windows-1252:

    Subject: =?Windows-1252?Q?french d=92avoir?=

Which illustrates the problem neatly: You have to know the character encoding in 
use to make sense of non-ASCII characters.
 [2014-01-23 15:22 UTC] cmbecker69 at gmx dot de 
Hm, the bug description is missing, but it seems astewart is
right that this is *not* *a* *bug*.
 [2014-01-23 18:48 UTC] requinix@php.net
-Status: Open +Status: Not a bug
 [2014-01-23 18:48 UTC] requinix@php.net 
The Wayback Machine has an archived copy with the description.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120723104144/https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47868

mail() doesn't know what encoding the string you gave for the subject is so stripping out bytes that aren't allowed in 7-bit ASCII is IMO a fair resolution. You can easily encode the subject yourself with

  "=?iso-8859-1?Q?" . quoted_printable_encode("french d\x92avoir") . "?="
(if it's ISO-8859-1 encoding, otherwise you'll need a different string)

The relevant RFC is 2047 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt

Or, you know, use a mail library that does all this stuff for you.
 
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