Can webread(url) be used to read a file?

url = 'file:///c:/filename';
raw = webread(url);

fails complaining that the <file://> protocol is not supported. Can it be true? Why wouldn't it be supported? I know the url is correct because

raw = urlread(url);

works as expected (but returns an unwieldy string).

[Timo Korthals]

Have you dug into the function? At one point the webread function just downloads the content and pass it to the function readContentFromFile(...). Maybe you can just work with this.