Need a little help with PHP_AUTH_(USER|PW)

. There are also a  few StackOverflow posts about it which tend to eventually come back to this one.

I found that one too, doesn't seem to work though.

I also missed the following the first time I read through the PHP manual page above (this is in the manual itself, not a user comment):

In order to prevent someone from writing a script which reveals the password for a page that was authenticated through a traditional external mechanism, the PHP_AUTH variables will not be set if external authentication is enabled for that particular page and safe mode is enabled. Regardless, REMOTE_USER can be used to identify the externally-authenticated user. So, you can use $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'].

Note: Configuration Note
PHP uses the presence of an AuthType directive to determine whether external authentication is in effect.

Thats interesting, because when I worked at PayPal, and I had a webpage auth via LDAP, in Apache, I noticed the username and password were stored in plain text in the PHP_AUTH variables, which caused my manager to make me scrap the project.. lol

Ill try some of these suggestions out, but I believe these work by causing the auth prompt to pop up, I was hoping to avoid that

P.S. This is what I tried: http://php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php#52405 With no avail