PHP and Samba

Hi,

Is there an easy way for PHP to access (read and write) files on an
arbitrary URL?

What I want to do is to have a form that asks the user where their files are
and for them to be able to enter something like:

smb://server/myfiles

....and for it to work. I don't want to have to mount the remote SMB shares
on the server machine if I can avoid it, unless there is some way of doing
this temporarily.

Thanks