PowerShell: How to read contents from text files without converting the lines into an array

Apparently, PowerShell’s get-content cmdlet automatically converts the contents of text files into an array of strings, splitting the contents at the line breaks (see Using the Get-Content Cmdlet). In many cases this is convenient:

Contents of file test.txt:

1
2
3

gc text.txt | % { write-host "line: " $_ }
line: 1
line: 2
line: 3

However, if you need the file’s contents as an unchanged string (e.g. to keep line breaks the way they are when working with Unix/Linux line endings) this is not what you want. In this case, you can use the .NET method File.ReadAllText() (see File.ReadAllText Method:
[System.IO.File]::ReadAllText("text.txt")
1
2
3