CodeIgniter: Cannot redirect after $this->email->send() - email

Question

i have the following code which sends an email from a posted form:
$this->load->library('email');
$config['charset'] = 'iso-8859-1';
$config['mailtype'] = 'html';
$this->email->initialize($config);
$this->email->from('info#mysite.com', 'Scarabee');
$this->email->to('info#mysite.com');
$this->email->subject('Message via website');
$data['msg'] = nl2br($this->input->post('msg'));
$data['msg'] .= '<br><br><b>Verstuurd door:</b><br>';
if($this->input->post('bedrijf')){
$data['msg'] .= $this->input->post('bedrijf').'<br>';
}
$data['msg'] .= $this->input->post('naam').'<br>';
$data['msg'] .= $this->input->post('adres').' - '.$this->input->post('postcode').', '.$this->input->post('gemeente').'<br>';
$data['msg'] .= $this->input->post('tel').'<br>';
$data['msg'] .= $this->input->post('email');
$message = $this->load->view('email', $data, TRUE);
$this->email->message($message);
if($this->email->send()){
$success = 'Message has been sent';
$this->session->set_flashdata('msg', $success);
redirect('contact/'.$this->input->post('lang'));
}
else{
show_error('Email could not be sent.');
}
Problem: the email gets sent with proper formatting (from the email view template), but the page then goes blank. For instance, if I try to echo out $message just below the $this->email->send() call, nothing shows up. Redirecting, as I’m attempting above, obviously doesn’t work either. Am I missing something? Thanks for any help…
Update
Traced the problem down to a function inside /system/libraries/Email.php (CI's default email library). Commenting out the code inside this function allows the mail to get sent, as well as a proper redirect:
protected function _set_error_message($msg, $val = '')
{
$CI =& get_instance();
$CI->lang->load('email');
if (substr($msg, 0, 5) != 'lang:' || FALSE === ($line = $CI->lang->line(substr($msg, 5))))
{
$this->_debug_msg[] = str_replace('%s', $val, $msg)."<br />";
}
else
{
$this->_debug_msg[] = str_replace('%s', $val, $line)."<br />";
}
}
The line that caused the error is: $CI->lang->load('email');
Go figure...
UPDATE 2: SOLVED
I had this in my controller's construct:
function __construct() {
parent::__construct();
$this->lang = $this->uri->segment(2, 'nl');
}
I guess there was a conflict between $this->lang and the _set_error_message function which also returns a "lang" variable (see var_dump further down).
Solution: changed $this->lang to $this->language, and everything's hunky dory!
Thought I'd post the answer here in case anyone else is ever losing hair with a similar problem :-)

Answer 1

It's likely that an error is occurring when you attempt to send an e-mail which is then killing your script during execution. Check your apache and PHP error logs ( /var/log/apache/ ) and enable full error reporting.

Answer 2

You could, for debugging purposes, try doing this:
...
$this->email->message($message);
$this->email->send();
redirect('contact/'.$this->input->post('lang'));
This should redirect you, regardless of your mail being sent or not (if you still recieve it, you can assume that the redirect would be the next thing that happens).
My own solution looks like this:
...
if ( $this->email->send() )
{
log_message('debug', 'mail library sent mail');
redirect('contact/thankyou');
exit;
}
log_message('error', 'mail library failed to send');
show_error('E-mail could not be send');

Answer 3

$ref2 = $this->input->server('HTTP_REFERER', TRUE);
redirect($ref);
By using the above code you can redirect to the current page itself
and you can set your flash message above the redirect function.