Adam versus Dropbox and oAuth

Frustration post incoming. If you'd like to skip my ranting, watch this breakdancing bear. Otherwise, let's keep going.

Update: I've posted an update below.

Stuck

I've never developed anything using Dropbox's API or oAuth before. I'm assuming I'm making a horrible, noobish mistake somewhere in here. There is no official PHP SDK for Dropbox API. There are a couple libraries floating around, but they looked like overkill for the simple app idea I'm working on.

My problem is that when I try to request a token from Dropbox via PHP and cURL I get an 'Error 4xx'. I've looked at the oAuth specs for the proper parameters to send in the header of the request, and right now my request looks like:

[request_header] => POST /1/oauth/request_token HTTP/1.1
Host: api.dropbox.com
Accept: <em>/</em>
Authorization: OAuth oauth_consumer_key="CONSUMERKEY", oauth_nonce="1340748835", oauth_signature_method="PLAINTEXT", oauth_timestamp="1340748835", oauth_version="1.0", oauth_signature="CONSUMERSECRET%26"
Content-Length: -1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Expect: 100-continue

And this doesn't yield a token, just 'Error 4xx'.

Yet, when I paste in the full request in the address bar of Chrome:

https://api.dropbox.com/1/oauth/request_token?oauth_consumer_key=CONSUMERKEY&oauth_nonce=1340743892&oauth_signature_method=PLAINTEXT&oauth_timestamp=1340743892&oauth_version=1.0&oauth_signature=CONSUMERSECRET%26

I get my token back no problem. So I'm assuming something is wrong with the format of my cURL request.

The reason I'm using PLAINTEXT as the method is because of this post in the Dropbox forums. And, like I said, just entering in the request directly works fine.

Help

Any ideas? Let me know on Twitter @a_simpson. I'll be sure to update this post once I get this problem sorted. So far, the lack of documentation for all this has been frustrating.

Update

Well I've sorted it out after sleeping on it, and breaking it all down again.

Turns out the cURL options array I was passing was incorrect. I was declaring CURLOPT_POST => true after several other POST-reliant options such as CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT and CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS. This mix-up was causing the request to error out. In retropect I should have realized that right away, oh well. Once I got the order straightened out, the request went through.

However, in my Googling to solve my problem I came across an awesome post from Wez Furlong detailing how to do HTTP requests in PHP without using cURL or any other library. I'll let you read it, but all I'll say is I switched to the solution he outlines, and I love it.