Yes, Guava provides this in the Resources class. For example:

CopyURL url = Resources.getResource("foo.txt");
String text = Resources.toString(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

With the directory on the classpath, from a class loaded by the same classloader, you should be able to use either of:

// From ClassLoader, all paths are "absolute" already - there's no context
// from which they could be relative. Therefore you don't need a leading slash.
InputStream in = this.getClass().getClassLoader()
                                .getResourceAsStream("SomeTextFile.txt");
// From Class, the path is relative to the package of the class unless
// you include a leading slash, so if you don't want to use the current
// package, include a slash like this:
InputStream in = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("/SomeTextFile.txt");

If those aren't working, that suggests something else is wrong.

So for example, take this code:

package dummy;

import java.io.*;

public class Test
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        InputStream stream = Test.class.getResourceAsStream("/SomeTextFile.txt");
        System.out.println(stream != null);
        stream = Test.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("SomeTextFile.txt");
        System.out.println(stream != null);
    }
}

And this directory structure:

code
    dummy
          Test.class
txt
    SomeTextFile.txt

And then (using the Unix path separator as I'm on a Linux box):

java -classpath code:txt dummy.Test

Results:

true
true

This works for me.

import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

// fileName: foo.txt which lives under src/main/resources
public String readFileFromClasspath(final String fileName) throws IOException, URISyntaxException {
    return new String(Files.readAllBytes(
                Paths.get(getClass().getClassLoader()
                        .getResource(fileName)
                        .toURI())));
}

Use getClass().getResourceAsStream(Name)

instead of

new File(getClass().getResource(Name).getFile())

In the end you get:

String content = new Scanner(getClass().getResourceAsStream(Name)).useDelimiter("\\Z").next();

Accessing a resource as a file is always a bad idea as the resource can be inside of a JAR file and therefore not directly accessible as common file. However if you access it as stream you can always access it.