fopen with https support ?

According to a 2 message thread in Jun 2001 Wez Furlong said : On 22/06/01, jeff@lfcity.org wrote: > We are not regular PHP developers, but one of our programmers developed a > patch to 4.0.5 that allows PHP to act as an SSL client. > > If you believe that it is useful, feel free to add to the PHP code base. Jeff, Thanks for your patch, but we do have an alternative method of providing SSL support planned that will work much like fopen("ssl://host") or fopen("https://host"). However, it might not be there until PHP 4.1 (although I'd like to get it into PHP 4.0.7, time permitting). --Wez. However these examples are not working. The patch from jeff@lfcity.org is not implemented(4.1.2). Is the support in the ex-head 4.2.0? Background: I use XMLRPC-EPI-PHP extension and Apache with mod_ssl. I've added all type of ssl support the the libphp4.so but the utils.php from the XMLRPC-EPI-PHP crashes - no function fsockopen_ssl(). After googling I found the post I put above. Best regards, Andrey Hristov