You probably want LWP::Simple from the LWP distribution. LWP::Simple will export a function named "get" that takes a URI as an argument and returns the contents of that URI.
As for modules in general, you should always be searching cpan at http://search.cpan.org.
Thanks I'll check into that. I've actually used that function once before but it was for sending data to a URI. I didn't know that it could be used the other way around, nifty.