The Nadeau Software site has posted a quick tutorial showing how to grab a remote web page with the help of the cURL extension in PHP.

The first step when building a PHP search engine, link checker, or keyword extractor is to get the web page from the web server. There are several ways to do this. From PHP 4 onwards, the most flexible way to get a web page uses PHP's CURL (Client URL) functions.

They walk through each of the functions the extension enables and include code where needed to show how it all works together.