How to shorten some lines that include codecs.open?

Question

I'm having trouble with 14 lines that needs to be shorten, these lines do: opens and reads the particular file. I already shortened the close() tags from each of these lines in a single loop but I just can't imagine how to do that with these lines:

Answer 1

def read_utf8(filename):
    with codecs.open(filename, mode="r", encoding="utf8") as f:
         return f.read()

header = read_utf8("static/header")