Reading contents from UTF-16 encoded file in Ruby

Question

I want to read the contents of a file and save it into a variable. Normally I would do something like:

text = File.read(filepath)

Unfortunately there's a file I'm working with that is encoded with UTF-16LE. I've been doing some research and it looks like I need to use File.Open instead and define the encoding. I read a suggestion somewhere that said to open the file and read in the data line by line:

text = File.open(filepath,"rb:UTF-16LE") { |file| file.lines }

However if I run:

puts text

I get:

#<Enumerator:0x23f76a8>

How can I read in the content of the UTF-16LE file into a variable?

Note: I am using Ruby 1.9.3 and a Windows OS

Answer 1

The lines method is deprecated. If you expect text to be an array with lines, then use readlines.

text = File.open(filepath,"rb:UTF-16LE"){ |file| file.readlines }

As the Tin Man says, it's better practise to process each line seperately, if possible:

File.open("test.csv", "rb:UTF-16LE") do |file|
  file.each do |line|
    p line
  end
end