PHP Wrappers
A wrapper is a custom way to access remote resources. It is designed to look like accessing a file, on the file system, but using other drivers than the ones of the hard drive. It is based on a configuration string, which looks like a URL: ftp://www.site.com/file.txt, where the part before the :// is the protocol.
Among the predefined PHP wrappers, there are http://, ftp://, zlib://, phar://, rar://, expect://.
<?php
$html = file_get_content('http://www.php.net/');
?>