How to read OSX .plist files from Java?

Question

How to read OSX .plist files from Java? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You should probably explain for readers what a .plist file is. It's a Mac file which is, as I understand, an XML-based format in its current incarnation. So, simply use Java's built in XML processing libraries to read it.

But perhaps you should also say what you mean by 'read' -- simply get it into memory, parse it, what?

Answer 2

I guess you refer to the plist format used on Mac starting with Mac OS X (and not the NeXTSTEP or GNUstep format).

1. Determine if the file is in XML or binary format
2. If in binary format use the plutil command-line-utility to convert file to xml format
3. Now you have the file in xml format, use any java-xml-library to handle the plist