Ruby file_get_contents equivalent

Question

I need to use this in my rails program so I can get the image contents and then base64 it. I know how to base64 it but I just don't know how I would get the image. Anyone know how?

Answer 1

Edited to retrieve from external URL:

PHP:

$image = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/file.png");

Ruby:

require 'net/http'
image = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse("http://www.example.com/file.png")).body

Answer 2

For http/https/ftp you can use OpenURI module:

require "open-uri"
image = open("http://www.example.com/file.png").read