Extract token from response url – Spotify API

I’m using this code to get a token from Spotify’s Web API:

<?php
$url = 'https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token';
$method = 'POST';

$credentials = "{Client ID}:{Client Secret}";

$headers = array(
        "Accept: */*",
        "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
        "User-Agent: runscope/0.1",
        "Authorization: Basic " . base64_encode($credentials));
$data = 'grant_type=client_credentials';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$response = curl_exec($ch);
?>

That results in this showing up in the browser:

{"access_token":"{token}","token_type":"Bearer","expires_in":3600}

Great! But how do I extract “{token}” from the response and use it as a parameter in a request to the API? For example in the request to https://api.spotify.com/v1/users/{user_id}/playlists which needs the token in the header field.

Thanks!

Answer

You need to decode the JSON:

$response = json_decode($response, true);

Then you’ll have an array with the values.

$token = $response['access_token'];

Also, you’re missing a necessary option to obtain the response in this way:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

If not defined, you will get a boolean value instead of the response.