Read contents of a local file into a variable in Rails

All I want to do is get all the content from a local file and store it in a variable. How?

File.read(@icon.full_filename).each {|l| r += l}

only gives me a part of it. In PHP, I just used file_get_contents.

data = File.read("/path/to/file")

I think you should consider using IO.binread("/path/to/file") if you have a recent ruby interpreter (i.e. >= 1.9.2)

You could find IO class documentation here http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.2/IO.html

Answering my own question here... turns out it's a Windows only quirk that happens when reading binary files (in my case a JPEG) that requires an additional flag in the open or File.open function call. I revised it to open("/path/to/file", 'rb') {|io| a = a + io.read} and all was fine.