grabbing web page data

[Anon]

I'm trying to grab an external webpage to process and place on a page of mine but I can't get the webpage to be captured.
I used the following code and it works if I have the page set to something like http://www.website.com/page.html but if it doesn't have the www. part it doesn't want to work.
Any ideas why this should happen and a solution to it would be greatly appreciated.

$web_url='http://something.website.com/page.html';

$web_page = join(' ',file($web_url)); //Read web page into variable
$web_page = strip_tags($web_page); //Remove HTML tags
$web_page = ereg_replace("[^{[:alnum:][:space:],.]","<br>",$web_page);}

print"$web_page";