All I want to do is get all the content from a local file and store it in a variable. How?
File.read(@icon.full_filename).each {|l| r += l}
only gives me a part of it. In PHP, I just used file_get_contents.
- 1I feel this is a uniquely Windows problem, because this solution, and the one proposed by zed_0xff work perfectly fine on Mac/Linux. I know that irb turns \r\n to \n when doing File.read... perhaps that's relevant here?Steven– Steven2010-06-16 17:18:10 +00:00Commented Jun 16, 2010 at 17:18
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3 Answers
data = File.read("/path/to/file") 
5 Comments
Steven
I thought that, but that gives me a string of length 52. The actual file size when I go File.size("/path/to/file") is 1676.
Tom Rossi
Doesn't that leave the file open?
tomasdev
I like this one! It would be nice to know how to keep the headers from file content type
Andrew
This is useful to read without use of a block, allowing contents to be easily parsed and set to variables available to other blocks without the need for creating a class.
AndrewKS
To address @TomRossi's question -- no, this does not leave the file open. Calling read on the File class opens, reads, and closes the file. However, calling read on an instance of file (which had to be opened first) does not close it. The method being called here is ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/IO.html#method-c-read as opposed to ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/IO.html#method-i-read
I think you should consider using IO.binread("/path/to/file") if you have a recent ruby interpreter (i.e. >= 1.9.2)
You could find IO class documentation here http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.2/IO.html
1 Comment
Rob
This is shorter and closes the file for you.
Answering my own question here... turns out it's a Windows only quirk that happens when reading binary files (in my case a JPEG) that requires an additional flag in the open or File.open function call. I revised it to open("/path/to/file", 'rb') {|io| a = a + io.read} and all was fine.
2 Comments
glenn jackman
Unless you're actually concatenating a bunch of files together, I'd just write that as:
data = File.open("file", "rb") {|io| io.read}
Augusto Samamé Barrientos
You sir, deserve a medal. I lost hours trying to figure out why my PDF attachments were unreadable when sent from a Windows server until I stumbled upon this answer.