= All-purpose Property List manipulation library
{}[https://rubygems.org/gems/plist]
{}[https://travis-ci.org/patsplat/plist]
Plist is a library to manipulate Property List files, also known as plists. It can parse plist files into native Ruby data structures as well as generating new plist files from your Ruby objects.
== Usage
=== Security considerations
Plist.parse_xml uses Marshal.load for attributes. If the attribute contains malicious data, an attacker can gain code execution.
You should never use Plist.parse_xml with untrusted plists!
=== Parsing
result = Plist.parse_xml('path/to/example.plist')
result.class
=> Hash
"#{result['FirstName']} #{result['LastName']}"
=> "John Public"
result['ZipPostal']
=> "12345"
==== Example Property List
FirstName
John
LastName
Public
StreetAddr1
123 Anywhere St.
StateProv
CA
City
Some Town
CountryName
United States
AreaCode
555
LocalPhoneNumber
5551212
ZipPostal
12345
=== Generation
plist also provides the ability to generate plists from Ruby objects. The following Ruby classes are converted into native plist types:
Array, Bignum, Date, DateTime, Fixnum, Float, Hash, Integer, String, Symbol, Time, true, false
* +Array+ and +Hash+ are both recursive; their elements will be converted into plist nodes inside the and containers (respectively).
* +IO+ (and its descendants) and +StringIO+ objects are read from and their contents placed in a element.
* User classes may implement +to_plist_node+ to dictate how they should be serialized; otherwise the object will be passed to Marshal.dump and the result placed in a element. See below for more details.
==== Creating a plist
There are two ways to generate complete plists. Given an object:
obj = [1, :two, {'c' => 0xd}]
If you've mixed in Plist::Emit (which is already done for +Array+ and +Hash+), you can simply call +to_plist+:
obj.to_plist
This is equivalent to calling Plist::Emit.dump(obj). Either one will yield:
1
two
c
13
You can also dump plist fragments by passing +false+ as the second parameter:
Plist::Emit.dump('holy cow!', false)
=> "holy cow!"
==== Custom serialization
If your class can be safely coerced into a native plist datatype, you can implement +to_plist_node+. Upon encountering an object of a class it doesn't recognize, the plist library will check to see if it responds to +to_plist_node+, and if so, insert the result of that call into the plist output.
An example:
class MyFancyString
...
def to_plist_node
return "#{self.defancify}"
end
end
When you attempt to serialize a +MyFancyString+ object, the +to_plist_node+ method will be called and the object's contents will be defancified and placed in the plist.
If for whatever reason you can't add this method, your object will be serialized with Marshal.dump instead.
==== Custom indent
You can customize the default indent foramt (default format is tab) or specify the indent format on each serialization. For example, if you want to reduce size of plist output, you can set the indent to nil.
An example to change default indent format:
Plist::Emit::DEFAULT_INDENT = nil
An example to specify indent format on dump:
Plist::Emit.dump({:foo => :bar}, false)
=> "\n\tfoo\n\tbar\n\n"
Plist::Emit.dump({:foo => :bar}, false, :indent => nil)
=> "\nfoo\nbar\n\n"
== Links
[Rubygems] https://rubygems.org/gems/plist
[GitHub] https://github.com/bleything/plist
[RDoc] http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/plist
== Credits
plist was authored by Ben Bleything and Patrick May . Patrick wrote most of the code; Ben contributed his plist generation library. The project is currently maintained by @mattbrictson[https://github.com/mattbrictson].
Other folks who have helped along the way:
[Martin Dittus] who pointed out that +Time+ wasn't enough for plist Dates, especially those in ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
[Chuck Remes] who pushed Patrick towards implementing #to_plist
[Mat Schaffer] who supplied code and test cases for elements
[Michael Granger] for encouragement and help
[Carsten Bormann, Chris Hoffman, Dana Contreras, Hongli Lai, Johan Sørensen] for contributing Ruby 1.9.x compatibility fixes
And thank you to all of the other GitHub contributors[https://github.com/patsplat/plist/graphs/contributors] not mentioned here!
== License and Copyright
plist is released under the MIT License.
Portions of the code (notably the Rakefile) contain code pulled and/or adapted from other projects. These files contain a comment at the top describing what was used.
=== MIT License
Copyright (c) 2006-2010, Ben Bleything and Patrick May
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.