Course of Raku / Objects, I/O, and exceptions / Input and output

Working with files

The simplest way to work with a file is to read or write it all at once.

The spurt routine writes a string to a file, creating the file (or replacing its contents if it already exists):

spurt 'greeting.txt', "Hello, file!\n";

The slurp routine reads the whole content of a file back into a string:

my $text = slurp 'greeting.txt';
print $text; # Hello, file!

Together, spurt and slurp let you save data and load it again with two short calls. (print is used here rather than say, because the text already ends with a newline.)

These whole-file operations are ideal when a file is small enough to hold in memory comfortably. For larger files, or when you want to process a file line by line, you use a file handle, covered at the end of this section. The next topic shows how to add to a file instead of replacing it.

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