John Davidson

Message:

I am trying to format a mailto link that works with a variety of mail clients. This works with Mac's "Mail" and Thunderbird. However, when I click the link on my Android phone, the query string in the URL is stripped starting with the equals sign. I have tried to add code to specify the content type, to parse the query string and re-add it, etc. So far, nothing works. Here's my code:

<?php

    ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');

    $BASEURL = strtok($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], '?');

    echo '

    <li><a href="mailto:?subject=An Article Worth Reading: ' . $ALTITLE . '&amp;body=I found this article worthwhile and think you will too:%0D%0A %0D%0A

    https://worldviewpublications.org' . htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['HTTPS_HOST']) . $BASEURL . "?" . htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) . "%0D%0A";

    echo '">share with a friend</a></li>

    ';

?>

I'm pretty proficient in html/css but a beginner with PHP, so I am not at all sure about the efficacy of some of the PHP I added. I'd greatly appreciate any help.

---

My Answer:
To prevent Gmail from stripping the = sign and everything after it from the URL in a mailto link, you can encode the URL using percent encoding. This will convert special characters like = into a format that can be safely included in the link.

Here is an example of how you can encode the URL in a mailto link:

html
Send Email


In this example, the URL `http://example.com/page?param=value` is encoded as `http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fpage%3Fparam%3Dvalue` to prevent Gmail from stripping the = sign and everything after it.

By encoding the URL in this way, you can ensure that the full URL is preserved in the mailto link when clicked in Gmail.