Reading contents from UTF-16 encoded file in Ruby - ruby

Question

I want to read the contents of a file and save it into a variable. Normally I would do something like:
text = File.read(filepath)
Unfortunately there's a file I'm working with that is encoded with UTF-16LE. I've been doing some research and it looks like I need to use File.Open instead and define the encoding. I read a suggestion somewhere that said to open the file and read in the data line by line:
text = File.open(filepath,"rb:UTF-16LE") { |file| file.lines }
However if I run:
puts text
I get:
#<Enumerator:0x23f76a8>
How can I read in the content of the UTF-16LE file into a variable?
Note: I am using Ruby 1.9.3 and a Windows OS

Answer 1

The lines method is deprecated. If you expect text to be an array with lines, then use readlines.
text = File.open(filepath,"rb:UTF-16LE"){ |file| file.readlines }
As the Tin Man says, it's better practise to process each line seperately, if possible:
File.open("test.csv", "rb:UTF-16LE") do |file|
file.each do |line|
p line
end
end

Answer 2

First, don't make it a practice to read a file directly into a variable unless you absolutely have to. That's called "slurping", and is not scalable. Instead, read it line by line.
Ruby's IO class, which File inherits from, supports a parameter they call open_args, which is a hash, on the majority of "read" type calls. For example, here are some method signatures:
read(name, [length [, offset]], open_args)
readlines(name, sep=$/ [, open_args])
The documentation says this about open_args:
If the last argument is a hash, it specifies option for internal open(). The
key would be the following. open_args: is exclusive to others.
encoding:
string or encoding
specifies encoding of the read string. encoding will be ignored if length
is specified.
mode:
string
specifies mode argument for open(). It should start with "r" otherwise it
will cause an error.
open_args:
array of strings
specifies arguments for open() as an array.