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

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

import subprocess

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