How to get the content of a remote file without a local temporary file with fabric

Question

I want to get the content of a remote file with fabric, without creating a temporary file.

Answer 1

from StringIO import StringIO
from fabric.api import get

fd = StringIO()
get(remote_path, fd)
content=fd.getvalue()

Answer 2

With Python 3 (and fabric3), I get this fatal error when using io.StringIO: string argument expected, got 'bytes', apparently because Paramiko writes to the file-like object with bytes. So I switched to using io.BytesIO and it works:

from io import BytesIO

def _read_file(file_path, encoding='utf-8'):
    io_obj = BytesIO()
    get(file_path, io_obj)
    return io_obj.getvalue().decode(encoding)