$ plutil -convert xml1 // convert to XML format $ plutil -convert binary1 // convert to binary format : ASCII text, with no line terminators // JSON formatĬonverting between the different plist formats can be performed using the plutil command line utility on macOS: : XML 1.0 document text, ASCII text // XML format

: Apple binary property list // binary format The property list file type can be identified using the file command on macOS: Although property lists can include NSData objects, it’s best to not use data objects in property lists to hold large amounts of binary data. And you cannot use property lists to store objects that are not supported by the architecture, such as model objects. You should not use property lists to store large, complex graphs of objects, especially when the objects have variable mutability settings. Property list files have the filename extension of plist. You can also edit a JSON file because it is just concatenated text and much less verbose than pure XML. However, you can manually edit an XML property list if you ever need to. The binary format is much more compact than the XML version and thus more efficient.

You can write property lists out in XML, JSON and binary formats. The abstract data types have corresponding Foundation classes, Core Foundation types, and XML elements for collection objects and value objects. This hierarchical nesting of objects creates a graph of objects. Dictionaries and arrays are special types because they are collections they can contain one or multiple data types, including other dictionaries and arrays. Property lists consist only of certain types of data: dictionaries, arrays, strings, numbers (integer and float), dates, binary data, and Boolean values. Both Cocoa Foundation and Core Foundation have APIs related to property list serialization and deserialization. Applications can later read the static representation back into memory and recreate the original hierarchy of objects. Property lists are easy to create programmatically and are even easier to serialize into a representation that is persistent. They are hierarchies of data made from specific types of objects-they are, in effect, an object graph. Property lists give applications a lightweight and portable way to store small amounts of data. A property list is a representation of a hierarchy of objects that can be stored in the file system and reconstituted later.

Mac edit plist