What is the purpose of connecting to a URL in PHP?

Connecting to a URL in PHP allows you to retrieve data from a remote server or website. This can be useful for fetching information, making API calls, or scraping web content. By connecting to a URL, you can interact with external resources and incorporate their data into your PHP application.

$url = 'https://api.example.com/data';
$data = file_get_contents($url);

// Process the retrieved data
echo $data;