Getting a value back from POST (not the built-in return)

Using a fairly simple fsockopen and POST I'm sending form data to a script which populates fields in a database. Everything works fine, however I've been trying to figure out how to send a value set on the other machine (database) back through the open socket (note: not the return value usually retrieved by fgets($fp etc...) which is then available to the sending machine. Searching via Google hasn't given me an answer. Is it possible? Can somebody help? Syntax would be very nice, I'm not a PHP guru. TIA, Paul