Kotlin Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

The readText() extension function is returning the String value representing the text of the given file. This is a convenient way of reading the file contents since it wraps the low-level logic of reading bytes from the FileInputStream class. Under the hood, before reading the bytes of the file, the function checks whether the file has the proper size to be stored in memory.

Keep in mind that, if the file size is too large, OutOfMemoryError is thrown. Whenever the file is too big to be processed at once, you should access its content using BufferedReader. You can easily obtain the BufferedReader instance by calling the File.bufferedReader() extension function.

The readText() function can also take the charset: Charset argument, ...