some crazy interesting file read business

ok so i am trying to read in a file from the web....the catch is there is a username and password involved. my script works becuase i can read in www.yahoo.com. i have tried using file, fopen, and readfile, but with no success. when i try my file which looks like, http://username:pass@whatever.com, it doesnt work. I get no error message just nothing shows up. any help would be greatly appreciated because i am going insane, have not got anything done for 4 hours. here is the code: $user_file=file("http://username:pass@whatever.com"); //$user_file=file('http://www.yahoo.com'); echo $user_file; while ($user_row=each($user_file)) { echo $user_row[1]; }