Opening a Remote File

You want to open a file that's accessible to you via HTTP or FTP.

Pass the file's URL to fopen( ): 

$fh = fopen('http://www.example.com/robots.txt','r') or die($php_errormsg);

When fopen( ) is passed a filename that begins with http://, it retrieves the given page with an HTTP/1.0 GET request (although a Host: header is also passed along to deal with virtual hosts). Only the body of the reply can be accessed using the file handle, not the headers. Files can be read, not written, via HTTP.

When fopen( ) is passed a filename that begins with ftp://, it returns a pointer to the specified file, obtained via passive mode FTP. You can open files via FTP for either reading or writing, but not both.

To open URLs that require a username and a password with fopen( ), embed the authentication information in the URL like this: 

$fh = fopen('ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com/pub/Index','r'); 

$fh = fopen('http://username:password@www.example.com/robots.txt','r');

Opening remote files with fopen( ) is implemented via a PHP feature 
called the URL fopen wrapper. It's enabled by 
default but is disabled by setting allow_url_fopen to off in 
your php.ini or web server configuration file. If 
you can't open remote files with fopen( ), check your server 
configuration.