perl LWP for PHP?

Hello, I'm familiar with perl's LWP library. Today I searched through the PHP documentation, but the only thing I found that was somewhat similar to LWP was file() and some socket-functions to do http-GET/POST calls to a foreign server. Are any higher level functions available so I don't have to handle encoding/decoding of parametersin the request, transfer encodings of http-response and timeouts of my own? Regards Marten