DESCRIPTION

This is a C++ Property List (plist) serialization library (MIT license). It supports both XML and binary versions of the plist format and is designed to be cross platform with minimal dependencies. The interface is simply a set of static methods which serialize a subset of stdlib containers to plists (as well as the inverse operation of deserializing plists into stdlib containers).

It uses boost::any as a generic type in order to support heterogenous containers, e.g. a dictionary is a map<string, any> and an array is a vector. The supported stdlib containers and their associations to plist types is shown below.

plist C++

string std::string integer short, int, long, int32_t, int64_t (always deserializes as int64_t) real double, float (always deserializes as double) dictionary std::map<std::string, boost::any> array std::vector date PlistDate (included class in PlistDate.hpp) data std::vector boolean bool

USAGE

See src/plistTests.cpp for examples of reading and writing all types to both XML and binary. E.g. to read a plist from disk whose root node is a dictionary:

    map<string, boost::any> dict; 
    Plist::readPlist("binaryExample1.plist", dict);

The plist format (binary or XML) is automatically detected so call the same readPlist method for XML

    Plist::readPlist("XMLExample1.plist", dict);

To write a plist, e.g. dictionary

    map<string, boost::any> dict;
    populateDictionary(dict);
    Plist::writePlistXML("xmlExampleWritten.plist", dict);

and for a binary plist

    Plist::writePlistBinary("binaryExampleWritten.plist", dict);

The other public methods allow for reading and writing from streams and byte arrays. Again, see the test suite code src/plistTests.cpp for comprehensive examples.

LIMITATIONS

Unicode strings are currently not supported.

INSTALL

Simply copy src/Plist.hpp, src/PlistDate.hpp, src/pugixml.hpp, src/pugiconfig.hpp, src/base64.hpp and src/pugixml.cpp to your project. If you do not have boost::any installed on your system, also grab the include/boost folder which contains the minimum boost headers needed for boost::any.

To compile and run the test suites (test suites will also run automatically as part of the post build process). Note, the UnitTest++ library is required and included.

OSX, Linux (for Linux, change OSX to Linux below):

mkdir -p OSX/Release cd OSX/Release cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../.. make cd ../../ sh runTests.sh Release OSX

and for Debug

mkdir -p OSX/Debug cd OSX/Debug cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ../.. make cd ../../ sh runTests.sh Debug OSX

Windows:

cd Windows cmake .. start Plist.sln (build solution) cd .. runTests.bat Release