What are other kinds of fetching remote URL contents with PHP?

Question

Are there any other kinds of fetching remote data in PHP, except for: "cURL" and having "allow_url_fopen" in php.ini set to "On", to be able to stream remote content using "fopen", "fsockopen" or "file_get_contents"?

I'm working on a custom-PHP remote content streamer and I'm looking for any other ways of streaming remote content, if the "cURL" or "allow_url_fopen" is "Off".

Answer 1

What about running system calls? Like passthru() or exec() or system() and calling curl or wget on the command line and capturing the data

Linux Example:

ob_start();
passthru("wget -U 'CustomUserAgent' -q -O - 'http://www.example.com/'");
$output = ob_get_clean();

Windows 7+ Example (through powershell). Taken from here

(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.example.come','C:\tmp\output.tx‌​t') –

To expand on the windows method, see executing a Powershell script from php