read

Reads length bytes from ARGF. The files named on the command line are concatenated and treated as a single file by this method, so when called without arguments the contents of this pseudo file are returned in their entirety.

length must be a non-negative integer or nil.

If length is a positive integer, read tries to read length bytes without any conversion (binary mode). It returns nil if an EOF is encountered before anything can be read. Fewer than length bytes are returned if an EOF is encountered during the read. In the case of an integer length, the resulting string is always in ASCII-8BIT encoding.

If length is omitted or is nil, it reads until EOF and the encoding conversion is applied, if applicable. A string is returned even if EOF is encountered before any data is read.

If length is zero, it returns an empty string (“”).

If the optional outbuf argument is present, it must reference a String, which will receive the data. The outbuf will contain only the received data after the method call even if it is not empty at the beginning.

For example:

$ echo "small" > small.txt
$ echo "large" > large.txt
$ ./glark.rb small.txt large.txt

ARGF.read      #=> "small\nlarge"
ARGF.read(200) #=> "small\nlarge"
ARGF.read(2)   #=> "sm"
ARGF.read(0)   #=> ""

Note that this method behaves like the fread() function in C. This means it retries to invoke read(2) system calls to read data with the specified length. If you need the behavior like a single read(2) system call, consider ARGF#readpartial or ARGF#read_nonblock.