How can one access and utilize the response headers when using file_get_contents() in PHP?

When using file_get_contents() in PHP to retrieve a remote file, the function does not provide access to the response headers by default. To access and utilize the response headers, you can use a combination of stream_context_create() to create a context with the 'http' option set to 'header' and get_headers() function to retrieve the headers. 

$url = 'http://example.com/api/data';
$context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array('header' => 'Content-Type: application/json\r\n')
));
$response = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
$headers = get_headers($url, 1);

// Access and utilize the response headers
foreach ($headers as $header) {
    echo $header . "\n";
}

Keywords

file_get_contents response headers PHP HTTP access

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