None of the functions I show here panic on their own, but I am using expect because I don't know what kind of error handling will fit best into your application. Go read The Rust Programming Language's chapter on error handling to understand how to appropriately handle failure in your own program.

Rust 1.26 and onwards

If you don't want to care about the underlying details, there are one-line functions for reading and writing.

Read a file to a String

use std::fs;

fn main() {
    let data = fs::read_to_string("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to read hosts file");
    println!("{}", data);
}

Read a file as a Vec<u8>

use std::fs;

fn main() {
    let data = fs::read("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to read hosts file");
    println!("{}", data.len());
}

Write a file

use std::fs;

fn main() {
    let data = "Some data!";
    fs::write("/tmp/foo", data).expect("Should be able to write to `/foo/tmp`");
}

Rust 1.0 and onwards

These forms are slightly more verbose than the one-line functions that allocate a String or Vec for you, but are more powerful in that you can reuse allocated data or append to an existing object.

Reading data

Reading a file requires two core pieces: File and Read.

Read a file to a String

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::Read;

fn main() {
    let mut data = String::new();
    let mut f = File::open("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to open `/etc/hosts`");
    f.read_to_string(&mut data).expect("Should be able to read to string");
    println!("{}", data);
}

Read a file as a Vec<u8>

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::Read;

fn main() {
    let mut data = Vec::new();
    let mut f = File::open("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to open `/etc/hosts`");
    f.read_to_end(&mut data).expect("Should be able to read data");
    println!("{}", data.len());
}

Write a file

Writing a file is similar, except we use the Write trait and we always write out bytes. You can convert a String / &str to bytes with as_bytes:

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::Write;

fn main() {
    let data = "Some data!";
    let mut f = File::create("/tmp/foo").expect("Should be able to create file");
    f.write_all(data.as_bytes()).expect("Should be able to write data");
}

Buffered I/O

I felt a bit of a push from the community to use BufReader and BufWriter instead of reading straight from a file

A buffered reader (or writer) uses a buffer to reduce the number of I/O requests. For example, it's much more efficient to access the disk once to read 256 bytes instead of accessing the disk 256 times.

That being said, I don't believe a buffered reader/writer will be useful when reading the entire file. read_to_end seems to copy data in somewhat large chunks, so the transfer may already be naturally coalesced into fewer I/O requests.

Here's an example of using it for reading:

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::{BufReader, Read};

fn main() {
    let mut data = String::new();
    let f = File::open("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to open `/etc/hosts`");
    let mut br = BufReader::new(f);
    br.read_to_string(&mut data).expect("Should be able to read to string");
    println!("{}", data);
}

And for writing:

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::{BufWriter, Write};

fn main() {
    let data = "Some data!";
    let f = File::create("/tmp/foo").expect("Should be able to create file");
    let mut f = BufWriter::new(f);
    f.write_all(data.as_bytes()).expect("Should be able to write data");
}

A BufReader is more useful when you want to read line-by-line:

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::{BufRead, BufReader};

fn main() {
    let f = File::open("/etc/hosts").expect("Should be able to open `/etc/hosts`");
    let f = BufReader::new(f);

    for line in f.lines() {
        let line = line.expect("Should be able to read line");
        println!("Line: {}", line);
    }
}