Show Line Breaks in Stripe Email Description

Question

I'm having trouble showing line breaks in Stripe's email receipts. The email description is generated via PHP and <br>, \r\n are displayed literally.

I also tried nl2br but since that displays <br> I'm sure it won't work.

PHP

$detail = "$name\r\n";
$detail .= "Length: $length,";
$detail .= " Width: $width,";
$detail .= "Color: $color,";
$detail .= "Qty: $qty\r\n";
$detail .= "Price: $price\r\n";

echo nl2br($detail);

How can I display line breaks on my Stripe email receipt using PHP?

Answer 1

Edit: It looks like Stripe began supporting line breaks at some point over the past few years, see comments on this answer.

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Previous answer:

I was trying to achieve the same thing and ended up talking with their support. In short:

• HTML tags will always be converted to entities.
• \n will be ignored.

As I see it, you have 3 options within these current constraints:

1. Use commas (or whatever) for items on one long line:

   Shampoo - $5.00, Toothbrush - $2.00, Soap - $3.00 --------------- $10.00
   

2. Send your own email.

3. Create a customer in Stripe, then create as many invoice items as you need, then create an invoice, then pay the invoice.

This does give you an invoice + a receipt email like this:

 Shampoo ----- $5.00
 Toothbrush -- $2.00
 Soap -------- $3.00

 Total ------ $10.00

But there's 1 huge caveat to #3. Invoices are automatically created by Stripe for all outstanding invoice items and subscription plans that a customer might have. This occurs 1 hour before an invoice should be charged (this is according to the interval that you might have setup for a plan, or perhaps at the end of the month if you're only dealing with invoice items, I'm not sure in the latter case.). This means you could technically have a customer checking out that gets charged for more items within the current transaction then they were anticipating, which just smells of bad design and a bad solution to a simple problem.

So, I'm sticking with comma separated items on 1 line for a current project, and doing custom emails whenever a client has the budget for us to build them.