Manipulating plist files on OS X - easy saving of prefs

[Ian Wood]

I've been having another look at storing preferences for Rev apps,  
this time for a Mac-only one (guess which one starting with AA...).

I remembered that Rev automatically makes a plist file in the user's  
preferences folder, and it occurred to me that it would make a lot of  
sense to use this file... ;-)

Then I remembered the 'defaults' read and write command...

function ijwPList_Write tDomain, tKey, tString
     put "defaults write" && tDomain && quote & tkey & quote && "'" &  
tString & "'" into tShell
     return shell(tShell)
end ijwPList_Write

function ijwPlist_Read tDomain, tKey
     put "defaults read" && tDomain && quote & tKey & quote into tShell
     return shell(tShell)
end ijwPlist_Read

These two functions allow you to read and write pretty well any info  
from and to any plist preferences file -  no need to deal with text  
files or XML or anything.
Note 1 - the write command will also add new keys to a plist file.
Note 2 - 'tDomain' is the name of the file minus the extension,  
usually taking the form 'com.companyname.appname', or for a specific  
example, 'com.apple.iTunes'. Multiple periods can also be used -  
'com.apple.iWork.Keynote'.

OS X 10.5 defaults to storing most plist prefs files as some form of  
binary that isn't very pretty, but the built-in plutil command line  
app will convert them back into a regular XML file if required:

function ijwPlist_convertToXML tPath
     -- tpath must be a Terminal-safe path
     put "plutil -convert" && quote &  "xml1" & quote && tPath into  
tShell
     return shell(tShell)
end ijwPlist_convertToXML



Hope people find this useful, and have a good time in Las Vegas!

Ian

P.S. Only tested on 10.5, but should (in theory) be fine back to 10.3.