works great:
http://php.net/file_get_contents
same use as
http://php.net/file
See examples in comments in those php.net pages!
<?php
$filename = "./myfolder/somefile.txt";
$mytext = file_get_contents( $filename );
// also works with URL links, to files ( html source code )
$filename = "http://www.google.com/index.html";
$google_index = file_get_contents( $filename );
echo $mytext;
echo "<br><br>";
echo $google_index;
?>
🙂 fantastic!