CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonplist
LMO
LMO

Reputation: 515

python plistlib file invaded by cocoa values?

I'm using plistlib to create and update a simple plist file in OS X. A tester in Norway is getting an error from plistlib: 

File "../axeomatic2/normal/build/pyi.darwin/aomDSP/out03-PYZ.pyz/plistlib", line 406, in parse
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, column 8

Looking at the plist file that was generated on his system, I see fields like this interspersed with the expected entries:

NSTableView Sort Ordering       Array
...
NSTableView Hidden Columns      Array
...
NSTableView Columns             Array
...
NSNavLastRootDirectory          Array

If I give him a plist from my system it works fine, but any time the program decides it needs to create one from scratch it gets an error.

I thought perhaps it was an encoding problem, but we're both on OS X 10.7 and both using the OS X version of UTF-8.

Any ideas as to what might be happening, or how I might troubleshoot this remotely?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1131

Answers (3)

hajimuz
hajimuz

Reputation: 412

Binary plist support has been added to plistlib since python 3.4. https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/plistlib.html

Upvotes: 1

yegle
yegle

Reputation: 5875

There's actually two categories of plist format. One is actually simple XML file (which plistlib knows how to parse with expat), the other one is binary property list.

Unfortunately they both share the same suffix .plist, and all the tools from Apple treat them transparently (e.g. you don't know if you are working with an XML plist or a binary plist, using tools like defaults)

Like @northtree said, the biplist package is the right tool to read/write the binary plist file.

UPDATE:

You can also use plutil(1) that comes with OSX to convert any plist file back to XML format, and then processed by plistlib

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/plutil.1.html

Upvotes: 0

northtree
northtree

Reputation: 9285

I had the similar problem before, after I try biplist, it's solved.

Upvotes: 3

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