The Read test step reads the contents of a file or URL and stores it in a variable. It supports the encoding below to read the files. 

• Default
• ASCII
• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• UTF-16 BE
• UTF-16 LE
• ISO_8859_1

Note: UTF-8 is widely used because it supports different language characters which are non-English.

Example use cases

• Read a local file (e.g. .testproject) to store all the content in one variable and then parse that information to fetch it in connection details later.
• If you have reference data (such as an Excel document with customer data) that you need to create an environment, you can easily modify that information within Excel and later read the data from that file into your environment.

How to use a Read test step

Step 1: Create a test case. 

Step 2: Drag and drop the Read test step from the Test Palette.

Step 3: Provide the file path or URL from which the content will be read. The file can be .txt, .xml, .log, etc.

Step 4: Choose the format as per the file.

Step 5: Select the desired character encoding scheme.

Step 6: Provide a result name. It is set to Contents by default. 

Step 7: Execute the test case.