output of fread() is blank

Hello, I'm a recent convert from CGI/Perl and so am still getting my feet wet in PHP. Here's my code: $filename = "http://www.myserver.com/include/sometext.txt"; $handle = fopen ($filename, "rb"); $contents = fread ($handle, filesize ($filename)); fclose ($handle); echo $contents; exit; The problem is nothing shows up, it's a blank browser window. I'm sure this is a stupid questions and very easily fixed. Also, if the text file I'm trying to read is multi lined, shouldnt I be placing the contents into an array? or is that old cgi habits coming through? Thanks, Roger