End of Life Ruby 3.1 has reached end of life and gets no more fixes. Switch to Ruby 4.0 →
class method
IO.binread
IO.binread(name, [length [, offset]]) → string
File.binread(name, [length [, offset]]) → string
io.c
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static VALUE
rb_io_s_binread(int argc, VALUE *argv, VALUE io)
{
VALUE offset;
struct foreach_arg arg;
enum {
fmode = FMODE_READABLE|FMODE_BINMODE,
oflags = O_RDONLY
#ifdef O_BINARY
|O_BINARY
#endif
};
convconfig_t convconfig = {NULL, NULL, 0, Qnil};
rb_scan_args(argc, argv, "12", NULL, NULL, &offset);
FilePathValue(argv[0]);
convconfig.enc = rb_ascii8bit_encoding();
arg.io = rb_io_open_generic(io, argv[0], oflags, fmode, &convconfig, 0);
if (NIL_P(arg.io)) return Qnil;
arg.argv = argv+1;
arg.argc = (argc > 1) ? 1 : 0;
if (!NIL_P(offset)) {
struct seek_arg sarg;
int state = 0;
sarg.io = arg.io;
sarg.offset = offset;
sarg.mode = SEEK_SET;
rb_protect(seek_before_access, (VALUE)&sarg, &state);
if (state) {
rb_io_close(arg.io);
rb_jump_tag(state);
}
}
return rb_ensure(io_s_read, (VALUE)&arg, rb_io_close, arg.io);
}
Opens the file, optionally seeks to the given offset, then returns length bytes (defaulting to the rest of the file). binread ensures the file is closed before returning. The open mode would be "rb:ASCII-8BIT".
If name starts with a pipe character ("|") and the receiver is the IO class, a subprocess is created in the same way as Kernel#open, and its output is returned. Consider to use File.binread to disable the behavior of subprocess invocation.
Example
File.binread("testfile") #=> "This is line one\nThis is line two\nThis is line three\nAnd so on...\n" File.binread("testfile", 20) #=> "This is line one\nThi" File.binread("testfile", 20, 10) #=> "ne one\nThis is line " IO.binread("| cat testfile") #=> "This is line one\nThis is line two\nThis is line three\nAnd so on...\n"
See also IO.read for details about name and open_args.