Setting Multiple Headers in a PHP Stream Context

Last week I tried to create a PHP stream context which set multiple headers; an Authorization header and a Content-Type header. All the examples I could find showed headers built up as a string with newlines added manually, which seemed pretty clunky and not-streams-like to me.

In fact, you've been able to pass this as an array since PHP 5.2.10, so to set multiple headers in the stream context, I just used this:

<?php
$options = ["http" => [
    "method" => "POST",
    "header" => ["Authorization: token " . $access_token,
        "Content-Type: application/json"],
    "content" => $data
    ]];
$context = stream_context_create($options);

The $access_token had been set elsewhere (in fact I usually put credentials in a separate file and exclude it from source control in an effort not to spread my access credentials further than I mean to!), and $data is already encoded as JSON. For completeness, you can make the POST request like this:

<?php
// make the request
$response = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

Hopefully this will help someone else doing the same thing next time (or at least I know I can come back here when I can't remember!), the array approach seems more elegant and maintainable to me.