For Scala >= 2.11
scala.io.Source.fromInputStream(is).mkString
For Scala < 2.11:
scala.io.Source.fromInputStream(is).getLines().mkString("\n")
does pretty much the same thing. Not sure why you want to get lines and then glue them all back together, though. If you can assume the stream’s nonblocking, you could just use .available, read the whole thing into a byte array, and create a string from that directly.