Open the file and return its contents.

def _read(self):
        """Open the file and return its contents."""
        with open(self.path, 'r') as file_handle:

            content = file_handle.read()

        # Py27 INI config parser chokes if the content provided is not unicode.
        # All other versions seems to work appropriately. Forcing the value to
        # unicode here in order to resolve this issue.
        return compat.unicode(content)