From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-01-18T03:59:50+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9468] Re: reading an entire file as a string

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:9465] Re: reading an entire file as a string"
    on 01/01/18, Dave Thomas <Dave@PragmaticProgrammer.com> writes:

|> Reading the entire contents of a file as a string is a common enough
|> operation.  We have the instance methods #read and #readlines. Was curious
|> about the asymmetry in that we only have the class method IO.readlines .
|> (Of course, we could write our own IO.read but was wondering why it isn't
|> in the language itself.)
|
|I'd vote for this in 1.6.3/1.7. I've found myself wanting it too.

OK.  But unlike readlines and each, read is not fundamentally for
reading whole file.  What kind of method do you want?

  (a) exactly like:

        f = open(path)
        begin
          f.read(*args)
        ensure
          f.close
        end

  (b) takes no argument, to read whole file always.

  (c) something else.

Once the spec is fixed, it's no problem to add in 1.7.

							matz.