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Read File

Read File

Section titled “Read File”

Type: read-file  ·  Package: Filesystem Activities v1.0.6  ·  Output: string

Reads the whole content of a text file and returns it as a string. Use it to read .txt files, templates, logs, settings or any plain-text content.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

Opens the file at the given path and returns its whole content as a single string, line breaks included. If the file does not exist, the activity fails.

  • Encoding: uses encoding (default utf-8), unless the file starts with a BOM, which wins. If accented characters look wrong, try iso-8859-1. See encoding.
  • All in memory: it loads the whole file; for very large files (hundreds of MB) consider splitting them.
  • Read-only: it does not change the file.

Required parameters

Section titled “Required parameters”
ParameterTypeDefaultDescription
pathstring—Path of the file to read.

Optional parameters

Section titled “Optional parameters”
ParameterTypeDefaultDescription
encodingstring"utf-8"File encoding: utf-8, iso-8859-1, utf-16, utf-32, us-ascii… See encoding.

Output

Section titled “Output”

Returns a string with the file content. An empty file returns "". To work line by line, split it with content.Split('\n') and clean each line with .Trim() (on Windows, lines end in \r\n).

Common errors

Section titled “Common errors”
MessageCause and fix
File not found.path does not exist. Check it first with File Exists or wrap the read in Try / Catch.
The process cannot access the file '…' because it is being used by another process.Another program has the file locked for writing.
Access to the path '…' is denied.No read permission, or path is a folder.
'windows-1252' is not a supported encoding name…The encoding is not available. Use iso-8859-1.
'path' is required.The path expression evaluated to null.

Example

Section titled “Example”
Read File   path = asset("email_template.txt")   → output: template
Set Variable   name = body   value = replace(template, "{name}", customer.name)
Section titled “Related activities”