Task

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.




  fid = fopen('filename','r');
  [str,count] = fread(fid, [1,inf], 'uint8=>char');  % s will be a character array, count has the number of bytes
  fclose(fid); 