What's the best way to open and read a file in Perl?

Question

Please note - I am not looking for the \"right\" way to open/read a file, or the way I should open/read a file every single time. I am just interested to find out what way m

Answer 1

If you want the entire file as a single string, there's no need to iterate through it.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );
my $data = q{};
{
   local $RS = undef; # This makes it just read the whole thing,
   my $fh;
   croak "Can't open $input_file: $!\n" if not open $fh, '<', $input_file;
   $data = <$fh>;
   croak 'Some Error During Close :/ ' if not close $fh;
}

The above satisfies perlcritic --brutal, which is a good way to test for 'best practices' :). $input_file is still undefined here, but the rest is kosher.