Google Docs downloading stopped working in XAMPP a few days

[zsero]

I have been downloading spreadsheets from Google Docs in PHP using a simple file_get_contents($url); method. The url has a form of

$url = "https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en_GB&hl=en_GB&key=something&single=true&gid=0&output=csv";

Its been working fine all the time, and it still works fine at my host, but it stopped working on my local windows based XAMPP installation.

The error it's showing since a few days is:

file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: Unable to find the wrapper "https" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?

My problem is that I couldn't find any field with neither "SSL" or "HTTPS" in the php.ini file in the XAMPP folder. Nor I could find any tutorial for simply just enabling downloading with SSL in XAMPP. All the tutorials were about how to serve HTTPS pages, not about downloading something with a simple file_get_contents($url) method.

Can you tell me what do I need to modify on my installation to make it work?

Remark:
1. file_get_contents() works fine with everything else
2. using the browser, I could download from the same url.