Complementing Aillyn’s answer, you could use a function like the one below to mimic the behavior of file_get_contents:
function get_content($URL){
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
echo get_content('http://example.com');