How to assign a password present in a file to a variable ?

Let's say you have a file 'secretfile' which contains the password 'newpass'. You want to assign the password mentioned in that file to a variable called 'pass1'.  The syntax will go like this:

# cat  secretfile
newpass

Method 1
# pass1=$(cat secretfile)
# echo $pass1
newpass

Method 2
# read pass1 < secretfile
# echo $pass1
newpass