Get URI Contents

Does WP have a built-in function that can read the contents of a URI into a string? I’m using the function below but I’m curious if WP already has something for that I can use.

function get_uri_contents($uri)
{
	if ( empty($uri) || !is_string($uri)) { return false; }
	$ch = curl_init($uri);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $uri);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$str = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	return $str;
}