Reputation: 4595

Creating a plist using Java

Is there an easy way to create a plist with Java? The result should be the same as serializing a dictionary in Objective C.

Upvotes: 8

Answers (5)

Dr. Max Völkel

Reputation: 1859

The existing answers look to complicated for simple cases. Here is a restricted shorter version:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Map.Entry;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;


public class PList {

    public static String toPlist(Map<String,String> map) {
        String s = "";
        s += "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";
        s += "<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC \"-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN\" \"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd\">\n";
        s += "<plist version=\"1.0\">\n";
        s += "<dict>\n";

        for(Entry<String,String> entry : map.entrySet()) {
            s += "  <key>" + entry.getKey() + "</key>\n";
            s += "    <string>" + entry.getValue() + "</string>\n";
        }

        s += "</dict>\n";
        s += "</plist>\n";
        return s;
    }

    public static void writePlistToFile(Map<String,String> map, File f) throws IOException {
        FileUtils.writeStringToFile(f, toPlist(map), "utf-8");
    }

}

Upvotes: 0

Rok Strniša

Reputation: 7202

You don't need any external Java libraries. Use the following steps:

Create an empty, stand-alone DOM document.

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
DOMImplementation di = builder.getDOMImplementation();
DocumentType dt = di.createDocumentType("plist",
  "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN",
  "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd");
Document doc = di.createDocument("", "plist", dt);
doc.setXmlStandalone(true);

Set plist version.

Element root = doc.getDocumentElement();
root.setAttribute("version", "1.0");

Enter data.

Element rootDict = doc.createElement("dict");
root.appendChild(rootDict);
Element sampleKey = doc.createElement("key");
sampleKey.setTextContent("foo");
rootDict.appendChild(sampleKey);
Element sampleValue = doc.createElement("string");
sampleValue.setTextContent("bar");
rootDict.appendChild(sampleValue);

Create a transformer.

DOMSource domSource = new DOMSource(doc);
TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer t = tf.newTransformer();
t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-16");
t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_PUBLIC, dt.getPublicId());
t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, dt.getSystemId());
t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
t.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");

Write to file.

StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(stringWriter);
t.transform(domSource, streamResult);
String xml = stringWriter.toString();
System.out.println(xml); // Optionally output to standard output.
OutputStream stream = new FileOutputStream("example.plist");
Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(stream, "UTF-16");
writer.write(xml);
writer.close();

You can then read such a file in Objective-C as described by the Property List Programming Guide.

Upvotes: 2