Building A PHP-Based Mail Client (part 1) - Fully Function-al (
Page 4 of 7 )
Before moving on, a quick word
about the "functions.php" file include()d in the script you just
saw.
"functions.php" is a separate file containing useful function
definitions. Every time I write a function that might come in useful elsewhere
in the application, I move it into "functions.php" and include that file in my
script.
An example of this is the validate_email() function used in the
script above - here's what it looks like:
<?
// check if email address is valid
function validate_email($val)
{
if($val != "")
{
$pattern =
"/^([a-zA-Z0-9])+([\.a-zA-Z0-9_-])*@([a-zA-Z0-9_-])+(\.[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)+/";
if(preg_match($pattern, $val))
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
?>
Again, this is fairly simple - I'm using PHP's pattern
matching capabilities to verify that the email address supplied conforms to the
specified pattern. The function returns true or false depending on whether or
not the match was successful.
