automatic credit card processing

Hi all I try to automatically process cc payment. I use online clearing via a third party --> so what I have to do: 1. SSL-TCP/IP connection to this third party-server 2. perform basic http authentication 3. send authorization request parameters to the software (via POST or GET) 4. receive + parse authorization response 1-3 is not a real problem, but how can I receive the response, before it is printed out to the browser/screen? I know I should get the response string into a variable so the whole procedure is "silent", but how? thanks a lot for every little help! cheers dominic