eat

Problems with the standard open-uri library

sometimes it returns String and sometimes StringIO (check out OpenURI::Buffer::StringMax, usually 10,240 bytes)
sometimes you have to call gets (for example open('http://yahoo.com').gets)
it overrides #open everywhere, which may be confusing.

Try #eat, which ALWAYS returns a String:

require 'eat'
eat('http://yahoo.com')                 #=> String
eat('/home/seamus/foo.txt')             #=> String
eat('file:///home/seamus/foo.txt')      #=> String

Options

eat('http://yahoo.com', :timeout => 10)                   # timeout after 10 seconds
eat('http://yahoo.com', :limit => 1024)                   # only read the first 1024 chars
eat('https://yahoo.com', :openssl_verify_mode => 'none')  # don't bother verifying SSL certificate

Warning: DOES verify SSL certs

If you want to disable verification of SSL certificates, use

:openssl_verify_mode => 'none'

Thanks @codahale and @peterc for their suggestions.

Supported schemas

local filesystem
http
https