Open an IO stream from a local file or url
Solution 1:
open-uri is part of the standard Ruby library, and it will redefine the behavior of open so that you can open a url, as well as a local file. It returns a File object, so you should be able to call methods like read and readlines.
require 'open-uri'
file_contents = open('local-file.txt') { |f| f.read }
web_contents = open('http://www.stackoverflow.com') {|f| f.read }