title: Reading a .txt file with escaped characters in Ruby
body: <p>I'm having difficulty reading a file with escaped characters in Ruby...</p>
  
  <p>My text file has the string "First Line\r\nSecond Line" and when I use File.read, I get a string back that escapes my escaped characters: "First Line\r\nSecond Line"</p>
  
  <p>These two strings are not the same things...</p>
  
  <pre><code>1.9.2-p318 :006 &gt; f = File.read("file.txt")
   =&gt; "First Line\\r\\nSecond Line" 
  1.9.2-p318 :007 &gt; f.count('\\')
   =&gt; 2
  
  1.9.2-p318 :008 &gt; f = "First Line\r\nSecond Line"
   =&gt; "First Line\r\nSecond Line" 
  1.9.2-p318 :009 &gt; f.count('\\')
   =&gt; 0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I get the File.read to not escape my escaped characters?</p>