HTTPS

Does anyone have experience with opening files with PHP via HTTPS? Apparently fopen() isn't due to support the protocol until the release of 4.3.0. All I'm trying to do is get the return from a query script running on a remote server based on arguments that I pass via the GET method. The remote server has access to volumes of sensitive data and would not be wise to bypass the ssl security. The URL string looks something like this:

https://secure.server.com/queryscript.php?1=argument1&2=argument2

and the response should be a five digit number displayed in the body:

12345

Any ideas?