Does Ruby provide a way to do File.read() with specified encoding?

From the fine manual:

read(name, [length [, offset]], open_args) → string

Opens the file, optionally seeks to the given offset, then returns length bytes (defaulting to the rest of the file). read ensures the file is closed before returning.

If the last argument is a hash, it specifies option for internal open().

So you can say things like this:

s = File.read('pancakes', :encoding => 'iso-8859-1')
s.encoding
#<Encoding:ISO-8859-1>