How to read the whole file in Ruby?

Question

Is there a built-in function in Ruby to read the entire file without using any loop? So far, I have only met methods that are read in chunks (string or character).

Answer 1

IO.read("filename") 

or

 File.read("filename") 

Answer 2

 File.readlines("filename") 

This is also a great way to read everything from a file and split the split into carriage returns. Return is an array with one row per element.

Answer 3

Please ignore the advice that says: "You should never interrupt (which is an annoying term for this)." Sometimes this is a very useful and reasonable thing.

Suppose you read the file again: there is a good chance that reading the file into an array is a reasonable optimization when reading a file line by line, even though o / s will cache the file.