Question

I’m not sure if this is possible, but I’ve seen people do crazy things with regex and other tools.

I want to convert this plist to an Objective-C literals:

<dict>
    <key>ar</key>
    <array>
        <string>+54## #### ####</string>
        <string>## #### ####</string>
    </array>
    <key>at</key>
    <array>
        <string>+43 1 ########</string>
        <string>+43 ############</string>

</dict>

converted to:

NSDictionary *dic = @{ 
     @"ar" : @[@"+54## #### ####", @"## #### ####"],
     @"at" : @[@"+43 1 ########",@"+43 ############"]
};

Is it possible to automate such conversion? This guy did something similiar: he parsed a PHP list into an NSDictionary using VIM.

Answer 1

Plist don’t have a separate ‘format’ for use in code (this question doesn’t quite make sense as-is). You either want to 1. generate Objective-C code which initializes the dictionary with these values, or 2. initialize the dictionary using the file, for which you can write

NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:@"UIPhoneFormats.plist"];

Edit: so you want to generate Objective-C code that in turn will reproduce the same dictionary. For this, you need to re-print the contents of the dictionary in a formatted way. You can write a program like this:

#import <stdio.h>
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

NSString *recursiveDump(id object)
{
    if ([object isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) {
        return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"@\"%@\"", object];
    } else if ([object isKindOfClass:[NSNumber class]]) {
        return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"@%@", object];
    } else if ([object isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]]) {
        NSMutableString *str = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"@["];
        NSInteger size = [object count];
        NSInteger i;
        for (i = 0; i < size; i++) {
            if (i > 0) [str appendString:@", "];
            [str appendString:recursiveDump([object objectAtIndex:i])];
        }
        [str appendString:@"]"];
        return str;
    } else if ([object isKindOfClass:[NSDictionary class]]) {
        NSMutableString *str = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"@{"];
        NSString *key;
        NSInteger size = [object count];
        NSArray *keys = [object allKeys];
        NSInteger i;
        for (i = 0; i < size; i++) {
            if (i > 0) [str appendString:@", "];
            key = [keys objectAtIndex:i];
            [str appendFormat:@"%@: %@", recursiveDump(key), recursiveDump([object objectForKey:key])];
        }
        [str appendString:@"}"];
        return str;
    } else {
        // feel free to implement handling NSData and NSDate here,
        // it's not that straighforward as it is for basic data types.
    }
}


int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

    NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:@"UIPhoneFormats.plist"];
    NSMutableString *code = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"NSDictionary *dict = "];
    [code appendString:recursiveDump(dict)];
    [code appendString:@";"];
    printf("%s\n", [code UTF8String]);

    [pool release];
    return 0;
}

This program will generate (hopefully syntax error-free) Objective-C initialization code out of the provided property list which can be copy-pasted to a project and be used.

Edit: I just run the program on a stripped version of the plist file OP has provided (the original file was way too large, so I cut it a bit) and it generated the following code:

NSDictionary *dict = @{@"at": @[@"+43 1 ########", @"+43 ############", @"01 ########", @"00 $"], @"ar": @[@"+54## #### ####", @"## #### ####", @"00 $", @"18 ### $ "]};

To verify it was really valid, I pasted this into the middle of an int main() to a file called ‘test.m’, so I got this program:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main()
{
    NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

    NSDictionary *dict = @{@"at": @[@"+43 1 ########", @"+43 ############", @"0$
    NSLog(@"%@", dict);

    [pool release];
    return 0;
}

To verify, I run clang -o test test.m -lobjc -framework Foundation and surprise, surprise:

It worked.

Edit 2: I made this a command line utility, just to facilitate further work – who knows, this may be useful in the future. Plist2ObjC

Hope this helps.