Need assistance with PHP curl call - php

Question

Hello: I am trying to do an API call using curl_init; have made some good progress but seem to be stuck...
we have an interface (swagger) that allows us to do the curl call and test it which works: here is the curl commands from that:
curl -X POST --header "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
--header "Accept: application/json"
--header "Authorization: Bearer xxxxx-xxxxxx- xxxxx-xxxxxxx"
-d "username=xxxxxxxx39%40gmail.com&password=xxxx1234" "http://xxxxxxxxx-xx-xx-201-115.compute-1.amazonaws.com:xxxx/api/users"
here is my attempt to do the same call in PHP code:
$json = '{
"username": "xmanxxxxxx%40gmail.com",
"password": "xxxx1234"
}';
$gtoken='xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxx-xxxxxxxx';
$token_string="Authorization: Bearer ".$gtoken;
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_URL => 'http://exx-ccc-vvv-vvvv.compute-1.amazonaws.com:xxxx/api/users', //URL to the API
CURLOPT_POST => true,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $json,
CURLOPT_HEADER => true, // Instead of the "-i" flag
CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded','Accept: application/json',$token_string)
));
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,TRUE);
$resp = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
I am getting a response code "500" which makes me think that there is something wrong with my input. So I am wondering if anyone can help with this...

Answer 1

In your command line code, you post a standard URL encoded data string using -d "username=xxxxxxxx39%40gmail.com&password=xxxx1234" but in PHP you are creating a JSON string and sending it as a single post field (not properly URL encoded).
I think this is what you need:
$data = array(
'username' => 'xmanxxxxxx#gmail.com',
'password' => 'xxxx1234',
);
$data = http_build_query($data); // convert array to urlencoded string
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
As far as I can tell the rest of the code looks fine.
Also, you don't explicitly need to set the Content-Type header, cURL will do this for you when you pass a string to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS. It will set it to multipart/form-data if you pass an array to CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS. But having it doesn't hurt anything either.