Bing Search API Authentication

This may seem a bit obvious to some, but this drove me nuts for a bit while trying to code up a Bing search service. When submitting the request using a GUI client and curl, the 'basic' in the basic auth header was not case sensitive. However, when submitting through code (Java and Groovy) the 'basic' had to be capitalized ('Basic') or I would get an error stating that the service only accepts Basic and OAuth authentication requests. As if this wasn't enough to drive you crazy there's another caveat. When submitting using curl, a gui, or through the web page you have to specify your api key twice (user/pw). However, when submitting through code, you only specify the key once in the password field. However, you do have to encode a ':' in front of your password or the service won't work. So, in summary, here are some examples:

// Works
 def authString = ":${apikey}".getBytes().encodeBase64()
// Header should look like this
 ["Authorization": ["Basic ${authString}"]]

 // Does not work. No leading colon (:) in the auth string. 'Basic' is lowercase
 def authString = "${apikey}".getBytes().encodeBase64()
 // Header should look like this
 ["Authorization": ["basic ${authString}"]]

I hope you'll find this as useful as I would have earlier today. :)