Hi,

When displaying a raw email address on a Web page, this address is vulnerable and can be used by spam crawlers, email harvester, or whatever you want to call them to send you spam and such crap. That’s why people write their email address this way “samy at dindane dot com”, or “samy[@]dindane[.]com”. This writing is simple and efficient, but not pretty.

There are many ways to show an email address in its original format and still make it bots-proof. One of these ways is using JavaScript to obfuscate and then show the address. But I think that using JS is overdoing things, since it can be done using basic HTML, simply by printing the email address as ASCII and not raw characters.

These are the steps to follow using PHP:

Split the email address into an array of characters

$aEmail = str_split($email);

Convert each character into an ASCII one:

$strEmail = '';
foreach ($aEmail as $char) {
    $strEmail .= ord($char);
}

Display it (O RLY?):

echo "<a href='$strEmail'>$strEmail</a>";

The result is a beautiful and clickable email address. :)

Note: If you are using Twig as a template engine, you have to use the raw() filter in order to tell Twig to interpret the string and not to display raw ASCII characters: strEmail|raw

I hope this tutorial has been helpful.
Bye!