Reading from a file

Groovy makes dealing with files a very pleasant business, thanks to a number of helper methods that work with standard Java's Reader and Writer, InputStream and OutputStream and File classes.

In this recipe, we are going to look at the options available for reading a file in Groovy and accessing its content, mainly through the Groovy-enhanced File class.

Getting ready

Let's assume we have a script that defines the following java.io.File object:

def file = new File('poem.txt')

Of course, in order to be read, the poem.txt file needs to exist in the same directory where our script is.

How to do it...

Let's explore some different ways to read the content of the poem.txt file.

1. In order to get the full text file content as a java.lang.String, you can use the getText method provided by the Groovy JDK extension:

   String textContent = file.text

   file.text is equivalent to file.getText, thanks to Groovy's special property getter handling syntax.

2. You can also read it into memory as a byte...