Problem Statement

Load the entire contents of some text file as a single string variable. If applicable, discuss: encoding selection, the possibility of memory-mapping. Of course, in practice one should avoid reading an entire file at once if the file is large and the task can be accomplished incrementally instead (in which case check File IO); this is for those cases where having the entire file is actually what is wanted.

Let's start with the solution:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { 
   ## empty record separate, 
   RS="";
   ## read line (i.e. whole file) into $0	
   getline; 	
   ## print line number and content of line 
   print "=== line "NR,":",$0; 
}
{
   ## no further line is read printed 
   print "=== line "NR,":",$0; 
}


#!/usr/bin/awk -f

@include "readfile"

BEGIN {

  str = readfile("file.txt")
  print str

}