The
readFile function reads a file and returns the contents of
the file as a string. The entire file is read strictly, as with
getContents.
Beware that this function (similarly to
readFile) is
locale-dependent. Unexpected system locale may cause your application
to read corrupted data or throw runtime exceptions about "invalid
argument (invalid byte sequence)" or "invalid argument (invalid
character)". This is also slow, because GHC first converts an entire
input to UTF-32, which is afterwards converted to UTF-8.
If your data is UTF-8, using
decodeUtf8 .
readFile is a much faster and safer alternative.