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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T04:43:54+00:00

I’m building an iPhone app that is essentially a book, it will be bundled

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I’m building an iPhone app that is essentially a book, it will be bundled with a lot of text-heavy content.

I considered bundling the data as XML and load it when the application starts but the XML would contain a lot of nested structures and be a bit of a pain to parse.

Would it be better to use a plist? I’m concerned about memory usage and plists are loaded entirely into memory – can they be parsed in chunks? Is there a maximum size to a plist and how efficient are they?

I’m not sure how big the bundled content is going to be yet but I should imagine it could be anywhere from 500k to 4MB.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Property Lists are the native serialization format for anything derived from NSObject. There are some issues with mutable-state preservation, but overall plist is the format preferred by Apple.There are parsing methods available with NSData that abstract away the details of the mark-up. As for XML, you’re burdened with the task of writing your own parser.

    You can refer to this for further details.

    It should be noted that a plist file itself is strict XML; in choosing plist, on the server-side you should be able to parse the plist XML and treat every two nodes as key-value pairs.

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