cURL is a very useful PHP library which can be used to connect to different types of servers with different types of protocols. Here is a very basic example of its primary usage to fetch a page.
<?php $c = curl_init('http://www.w3mentor.com/robots.txt'); curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $page = curl_exec($c); curl_close($c); ?>
