File-get-contents failed to open stream Unauthorized

Question

I am trying to use file_get_contents.I have made sure that allow_url_fopen is enabled in php.ini. As of now it is telling me:

[function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

All I'm doing is the following, which I can access through browser without a problem.

$url=('http://site/@api/users/=john_smith@site.com/properties');
$xmlString=file_get_contents($url);

I believe this is an authentication issue but not sure how I can supply the proper credentials from within the script itself. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

In your url try:

http://user:password@site/ 

(append whatever the rest of the URL for your API should be)

Answer 2

Just put the user info into the URL:

$url = 'http://user:password@domain.tld/foo/bar/whatever';

Answer 3

The 401 Unauthorized status code means that you should have authenticated, but that you haven't, or that you have authenticated with the wrong credentials. It is most commonly used when using HTTP authentication, which is authentication built into the HTTP protocol, and therefore is universal, not only for HTML documents, but for anything transfered over the HTTP protocol.

To authenticate with HTTP authentication, simply add username:password@ before the hostname in the URL. For instance:

http://foobar:mysupersecretpassword@example.com/passwordprotected/

This would request the /passwordprotected/ directory from example.com with the username foobar and the password mysupersecretpassword.

It's not any worse than that. :)