PHP: oauth_signature resulting in "Invalid signature"

[Beckah Sheeler]

I have tried multiple examples including the following and some of the questions in this group with no luck:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15892957/fatsecret-api-food-get-method-invalid-signature
https://github.com/EugeneHoran/Android-FatSecret-REST-API

The script I running is the following (based off of one of the answers):

<?php
$consumer_key = "***********";
$secret_key = "**********";
//Signature Base String
//<HTTP Method>&<Request URL>&<Normalized Parameters>
$base = rawurlencode("GET")."&";
$base .= "http%3A%2F%2Fplatform.fatsecret.com%2Frest%2Fserver.
api&";
//sort params by abc....necessary to build a correct unique signature
$params = "method=foods.search&";
$params .= "oauth_consumer_key=$consumer_key&"; // ur consumer key
$params .= "oauth_nonce=123&";
$params .= "oauth_signature_method=HMAC-SHA1&";
$params .= "oauth_timestamp=".time()."&";
$params .= "oauth_version=1.0&";
$params .= "search_expression=".urlencode($_GET['pasVar']);
$params2 = rawurlencode($params);
$base .= $params2;
//encrypt it!
$sig= base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base, "$secret_key&",
true)); // replace xxx with Consumer Secret
//now get the search results and write them down
$url = "http://platform.fatsecret.com/rest/server.api?".
$params."&oauth_signature=".rawurlencode($sig);
//$food_feed = file_get_contents($url);
list($output,$error,$info) = loadFoods($url);
echo '<pre>';
if($error == 0){
    if($info['http_code'] == '200')
        echo $output;
    else
        die('Status INFO : '.$info['http_code']);
}
else
    die('Status ERROR : '.$error);
function loadFoods($url)
{
        // create curl resource
        $ch = curl_init();
        // set url
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        //return the transfer as a string
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        // $output contains the output string
        $output = curl_exec($ch);
        $error = curl_error($ch);
        $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
        // close curl resource to free up system resources
        curl_close($ch);
        return array($output,$error,$info);
}
?>

Which repeatedly results in 

Invalid signature: oauth_signature '***************'

What am I doing wrong in my code that makes it consistently generate a wrong signature?

[John Rocha]

Did you get it to work? im getting the same issue.