From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-03-04T02:31:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Loading a file in a buffer...

Alle Monday 03 March 2008, Zangief Ief ha scritto:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I would like to load the exact content of a file in a buffer (with the
> same carriage return). To do so, I had trying this:
>
> file = File.open('/home/my_file')
>
> To verify if that work normally, I had try to add this for display the
> content of my_file:
>
> puts file
>
> But my_file was not been printed, and I got: #<File:0x28d70>
>
>
> If you know a way to do so, please help me :)
> Thanks.
>
> Zang'

To get the contents of a file, opening it is not enough. You need to
explicitly read its contents. There are many methods which allow to access the 
contents of a file: read, readlines, each_line, each_byte, File.read,
File.readlines, File.foreach (the last three are class methods). They're
documented under class IO (from which File is derived). If you only need to
read the contents of the file you don't need to use File.open at all, but
simply use File.read:

contents = File.read('/home/my_file'/)

I hope this helps

Stefano