The best way to store arrays as text file?

[David Bovill]

Like a lot of people I use arrays a lot, and as it is generally good
practice to store data external to the application it is usefull to be able
to save array data to disk as a some sort of file. So my question is what is
the best way of storing arbitrary array data in a cross platform way?

You could do it using a stack - which works and while I cannot think of
anything directly against it - well lets say we don't do that :)
How about those annoying Apple pLists? While they are an ugly looking
structure they do seem to have the right sort of structure to store
arbitrary array data. The array keys can are not used as tags but tag
contents of a "<key> element, and I think it should be possible to create
two general functions:

  - arrayToXML and xmlToArray for storing anything you have in
(multidimensional) arrays to disk and back.

One advantage of using pLists is that you get access to all sorts of other
usefull data stored in that format - but is there a better format / option?