Author: techworkshop

When working with APIs or external resources in PHP, sometimes you need to inspect the HTTP response headers — not just the content. While cURL is commonly used for this, you can also retrieve headers using the built-in file_get_contents() function with the right stream context.

In this post, we learn the effective way to get response headers, while using PHP file_get_contents() function.

Using $http_response_header PHP variable to Get Response Headers

We use file_get_contents() to fetch the content from a URL. But with some configuration, you can also access the response headers.

Here’s how you can do it:

<?php
$url = "https://example.com";

// Create a stream context
$options = [
    "http" => [
        "method" => "GET",
        "header" => "User-Agent: PHP\r\n"
    ]
];
$context = stream_context_create($options);

// Fetch the content
$response = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

// Display the content
echo $response;

// Get the response headers
print_r($http_response_header);
?>

Explanation

• We used stream_context_create() to define HTTP request options, like headers or methods.
• The $http_response_header is a special PHP variable automatically populated when using file_get_contents() with an HTTP context.
• It contains the raw headers returned by the server as an indexed array.

Example Output

When you run the above script, $http_response_header might contain something like:

Array
(
    [0] => HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    [1] => Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    [2] => Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:30:00 GMT
    ...
)

Checking Specific Headers

You can loop through the headers to extract specific values:

foreach ($http_response_header as $header) {
    if (stripos($header, "Content-Type:") !== false) {
        echo "Content-Type Header: $header";
    }
}

Use Cases

We can use this method for various purpose as follows:

• Verifying HTTP status codes
• Checking content type or caching headers
• Basic debugging of server responses without using cURL

Conclusion

While file_get_contents() is often seen as a simple way to read data from URLs, it’s surprisingly powerful when paired with stream contexts. For lightweight HTTP requests where you don’t need advanced control, it’s a quick alternative to cURL — and retrieving headers is straightforward using $http_response_header.