CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a email template that I send out to get people to verify their info every year.  It has some smarty if then type things.  It worked no problem last year.  We upgraded to 3.4.7 since then and now it doesn't work.  Well, it still works with plain text but not HTML.

Because households don't have a firstname I do a

{if "{contact.last_name}" neq ""}
First Name:   {contact.first_name}
Last Name:    {contact.last_name}
{/if}

This blew up.  After considerable trial and mostly error I discovered it didn't like the quotes.  So I went to assigning last_name and null to variable

{assign var=LastName value="{contact.last_name}"}
{assign var=Empty value=null}
{if $LastName neq $Empty}

This worked until it hit a last name that had a space in it like Van Buren, then it complains of     

syntax error: expecting '=' after attribute name 'Van'

Anyone have any thoughts on how to either fix this or get around it?