fsockopen and https

Hello All, I am new to this list and am sure most of you are tired of this subject appearing. Please forgive me as I am becoming tired of searching archives and the internet and I am hoping someone here can help me. I am using fsockopen to post data to a dll on a SSL server. I setup the socket data and successfully posted the data to port 80 but as soon as I switch to port 443 I received no errors or text. Yes I am trying to interface with an authorize.net compatible gateway and I know most of you will tell me the only way to do this is with cURL but I am finding that hard to believe. I recently had someone tell me PHP scripts over an HTTPS connection would not parse; this person said the code of the script would appear. I told him this was interesting as I have PHP scripts running under HTTPS connections without cURL. Anyway, back to the point; I am trying to talk with an IIS server and need to figure out what needs to be done to make this return the results properly. Am I missing something in my headers? All I am doing is connecting to the server and making a POST /gateway/transact.dll?var1=xyz&var2=abc etc. Here's the code used: $sgate = fsockopen($URL,80,&$errno,&$errstr,30); if(!$sgate) { die("$errstr ($errno)<br>\n"); } else { fputs($sgate," /gateway/transact.dll?$postSTR HTTP/1.0\n\n"); while(!feof($sgate)) { $result.=fgets($sgate,1024); } } fclose($sgate); This portion works perfect until I change the port to 443; Please if it is possible to do this without cURL I would appreciate the help. Thanks, -John-