13.5. plistlib
— Generate and parse Mac OS X .plist
files¶
Source code: Lib/plistlib.py
This module provides an interface for reading and writing the “property list” XML files used mainly by Mac OS X.
The property list (.plist
) file format is a simple XML pickle supporting
basic object types, like dictionaries, lists, numbers and strings. Usually the
top level object is a dictionary.
To write out and to parse a plist file, use the writePlist()
and
readPlist()
functions.
To work with plist data in bytes objects, use writePlistToBytes()
and readPlistFromBytes()
.
Values can be strings, integers, floats, booleans, tuples, lists, dictionaries
(but only with string keys), Data
or datetime.datetime
objects. String values (including dictionary keys) have to be unicode strings –
they will be written out as UTF-8.
The <data>
plist type is supported through the Data
class. This is
a thin wrapper around a Python bytes object. Use Data
if your strings
contain control characters.
See also
- PList manual page
- Apple’s documentation of the file format.
This module defines the following functions:
-
plistlib.
readPlist
(pathOrFile)¶ Read a plist file. pathOrFile may either be a file name or a (readable) file object. Return the unpacked root object (which usually is a dictionary).
The XML data is parsed using the Expat parser from
xml.parsers.expat
– see its documentation for possible exceptions on ill-formed XML. Unknown elements will simply be ignored by the plist parser.
-
plistlib.
writePlist
(rootObject, pathOrFile)¶ Write rootObject to a plist file. pathOrFile may either be a file name or a (writable) file object.
A
TypeError
will be raised if the object is of an unsupported type or a container that contains objects of unsupported types.
-
plistlib.
readPlistFromBytes
(data)¶ Read a plist data from a bytes object. Return the root object.
-
plistlib.
writePlistToBytes
(rootObject)¶ Return rootObject as a plist-formatted bytes object.
The following class is available:
-
class
plistlib.
Data
(data)¶ Return a “data” wrapper object around the bytes object data. This is used in functions converting from/to plists to represent the
<data>
type available in plists.It has one attribute,
data
, that can be used to retrieve the Python bytes object stored in it.
13.5.1. Examples¶
Generating a plist:
pl = dict(
aString = "Doodah",
aList = ["A", "B", 12, 32.1, [1, 2, 3]],
aFloat = 0.1,
anInt = 728,
aDict = dict(
anotherString = "<hello & hi there!>",
aThirdString = "M\xe4ssig, Ma\xdf",
aTrueValue = True,
aFalseValue = False,
),
someData = Data(b"<binary gunk>"),
someMoreData = Data(b"<lots of binary gunk>" * 10),
aDate = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(time.gmtime())),
)
writePlist(pl, fileName)
Parsing a plist:
pl = readPlist(pathOrFile)
print(pl["aKey"])