PHP stream post request not working, but works with curl - php

Question

I want to send post request as php stream
$aruguments = http_build_query(
array(
'apikey' => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
'appid' => 730,
'min' => 20,
'items_per_page' => 100
)
);
$opts_stream = array('http' =>
array(
'method' => 'POST',
'header' => 'Content-Type: application/json' .
'x-requested-with: XMLHttpRequest',
'content' => $aruguments
)
);
$context_stream = stream_context_create($opts_stream);
$json_stream = file_get_contents('https://api.example.de/Search', false, $context_stream);
$data_stream = json_decode($json_stream, TRUE);
For some reason i get error saying:
failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
If i send this same request with cUrl it works normaly but its very slow.
Here is my cUrl request that works
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.example.de/Search');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "{ \"apikey\": \"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\",\"min\": 20, \"appid\": 730, \"items_per_page\": $number_of_items_per_request }");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$headers = array();
$headers[] = 'Accept: application/json';
$headers[] = 'Content-Type: application/json';
$headers[] = 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

Answer 1

There are a couple of issues with the posted code.
Headers
When you're adding headers, you set them all in one single string. For the target server to know when one header ends and the other begins, you need to separate them using new lines (\r\n):
'header' => "Content-Type: application/json\r\n"
. "x-requested-with: XMLHttpRequest\r\n",
Post data
The big difference between your stream context and your cURL code is that your cURL code are posting the data in json-format, while you're stream context are posting the data as a x-www-form-urlencoded string. You're still telling the server that the content is json though, so I guess the server gets a bit confused.
Post the data as json instead by changing:
$aruguments = http_build_query(
array(
'apikey' => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
'appid' => 730,
'min' => 20,
'items_per_page' => 100
)
);
to
$aruguments = json_encode(
array(
'apikey' => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
'appid' => 730,
'min' => 20,
'items_per_page' => 100
)
);