Hi Zach, welcome to the site.
It is really difficult to help you without seeing the code that you are opening the file with. I haven't explored the possibilities of getting fopen to work for you, but here is an alternative method.
file() reads the file given in the argument into an array. each line is a new element of the array. then you can impode the array into a new string. see the code below. if the file is not there, it will not generate an internal error.
PHP Code:
<?
// file() reads the target into an array
$file_array = @file("http://codenewbie.com/no-file-exists.php");
// create string
if(is_array($file)){
$file_text = implode("\n",$file_array);
}
// now do other stuff with $file_text
?>
HTH