Read file {fname} and return a |List|, each line of the file as an item. Lines are broken at NL characters. Macintosh files separated with CR will result in a single long line (unless a NL appears somewhere). All NUL characters are replaced with a NL character. When {type} contains "b" binary mode is used:

• When the last line ends in a NL an extra empty list item is added.
• No CR characters are removed. Otherwise:
• CR characters that appear before a NL are removed.
• Whether the last line ends in a NL or not does not matter.
• When 'encoding' is Unicode any UTF-8 byte order mark is removed from the text. When {max} is given this specifies the maximum number of lines to be read. Useful if you only want to check the first ten lines of a file: :for line in readfile(fname, '', 10) : if line =~ 'Date' | echo line | endif :endfor When {max} is negative -{max} lines from the end of the file are returned, or as many as there are. When {max} is zero the result is an empty list. Note that without {max} the whole file is read into memory. Also note that there is no recognition of encoding. Read a file into a buffer if you need to. Deprecated (use |readblob()| instead): When {type} contains "B" a |Blob| is returned with the binary data of the file unmodified. When the file can't be opened an error message is given and the result is an empty list. Also see |writefile()|. Can also be used as a |method|: GetFileName()->readfile()