Retrieve authentication token from api via post - php

Question

Im trying to build an app that uses the simplenote api but I am having trouble with the authentication part. I am getting a 400 error(bad request).
Im guessing this issue is not related to the simplenote api, it's rather my understanding of the documentation.
Here is what the api is saying:
HTTP POST to the following URL:
https://simple-note.appspot.com/api/login
The body of the request should contain this, but base64-encoded:
email=[email-address]&password=[password]
To be clear, you will concatenate email= with the user’s email address (trimmed),
&password=, and the user’s password; then base64 the resulting string and send it as
the HTTP request body. (Do not encode this request using the standard variable
encoding used for POSTed web forms. We basically ignore the Content+Type header
for this request, but text/plain makes the most sense here.)
And here is my code so far:
$url = 'https://simple-note.appspot.com/api/login';
$data = array('email' => base64_encode($email), 'password' => base64_encode($password));
$options = array(
'http' => array(
'header' => "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n",
'method' => 'POST',
'content' => http_build_query($data),
),
);
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$result = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
var_dump($result);

Answer 1

I think what they mean is:
$data = base64_encode(http_build_query(array(
"email" => $email,
"password" => $password
));
So base64 encode the resulting string, not the individual parts.
As for making the request. I can recommend you take a look at cURL, it's much faster than file_get_contents.