Sending an HTTP request and reading the response

I'm a bit new to PHP. One thing I'm trying to do right now is send an
HTTP request and read the response in the code. For an example of what
I'm talking about, see this:

http://www.google.com/apis/maps/docu...g_HTTP_Request

Would someone be able to show me a quick example of how to do this in
my PHP code? I have a page that gets the "address" value posted to it
from a form. Now I need to pass that value to the HTTP request and
read back the response. Then I'll need that response in the form of a
$latitude value and a $longitude value.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

cyber0ne wrote:$contents = file_get_contents($url);

Quick enough?