clj-plist

This is a Clojure library to parse the Property List (.plist) files that are ubiquitous on Mac OS X.

Usage

The library has one public function, parse-plist, which takes as input a File, an InputStream, or a String naming a URI to read for the plist data. (parse-plist just passes its argument to clojure.xml/parse, so any source usable with that function will work with parse-plist.) The function returns a native Clojure data structure corresponding to the plist data, according to the following table:

plist tag	Clojure equivalent
array	vector
data	byte[]
date	Joda DateTime object
dict	hash map
false	false
integer	Long
real	Double
string	string
true	true

Invocation example

(use 'com.github.bdesham.clj-plist)
(parse-plist (java.io.File. "MyPropertyList.plist"))

Example

Input plist file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>String example</key>
	<string>This is just some uninteresting text</string>
	<key>Array example</key>
	<array>
		<integer>2</integer>
		<real>3.14159</real>
	</array>
	<key>Boolean example</key>
	<true/>
	<key>Date example</key>
	<date>1969-07-20T07:56:00Z</date>
	<key>Data example</key>
	<data>YWJjZGVmZw==</data>
</dict>
</plist>

Parsed Clojure version

{"Array example" [2 3.14159],
 "Boolean example" true,
 "Data example" #<byte[] [B@3ea86d12>,
 "Date example" #<DateTime 1969-07-20T02:56:00.000-05:00>,
 "String example" "This is just some uninteresting text"}

Notes

This library is no longer under active development. Pull requests are still welcome.

The entire plist is sucked into memory at once, so there’s a relatively low limit on the size of the plist that can be loaded. (Trying to import my “iTunes Music Library.xml”, which is 16.2 MiB, causes a heap overflow on my system with the default Java memory limits.) Some sort of lazy loading would fix this.

Binary plist files are not supported (see issue 1). In the meantime, you can use plutil on OS X to convert binary plist files to XML plist files via /usr/bin/plutil -convert xml1 -o output.plist input.plist.

References

For more information on plist files, see the Apple man page for property list files.

Version history

• Version 0.10.0 (2016-01-15)
  • Allow the specification of a keyword-fn function to be applied to <key> elements (thanks Ben Cook!)
  • Add a test (thanks Marc O’Morain!)
  • Add support for CircleCI (thanks Marc O’Morain!)
  • Clojure 1.5 is now required.
• Version 0.9.1 (2012-09-11)
  • Initial public release.

License

Copyright © 2011–2016 Benjamin D. Esham.

This project is distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as that used by Clojure. A copy of the license is included as “epl-v10.html” in this distribution.