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:

my $string = slurp 'sample.txt';

my $string = slurp 'sample.txt', :enc;

my $string = 'sample.txt'.IO.slurp;