Easiest way to read/write a file's content in Python

Question

In Ruby you can read from a file using s = File.read(filename). The shortest and clearest I know in Python is

with open(filename) as f:
    s =          


        

Answer 1

contents = open(filename)

This gives you generator so you must save somewhere the values though, or

contents = [line for line in open(filename)]

This does the saving to list explicit close is not then possible (at least with my knowledge of Python).

Answer 2

Slow, ugly, platform-specific... but one-liner ;-)

import subprocess

contents = subprocess.Popen('cat %s' % filename, shell = True, stdout = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

Answer 3

Simple like that:

    f=open('myfile.txt')
    s=f.read()
    f.close()

And do whatever you want with the content "s"