Thanks for the excellent example. I worked your code, with a few minor tewaks, into a standalone class in case anyone else finds it useful

read_file($inPath);

// Class definition class PListFile { function read_file($inPath) { $document = new DOMDocument(); $document->load($inPath);

    return $this->parse_plist($document);
}

function parse_plist($inDocument) 
{
    $docNode = $inDocument->documentElement;
    $root    = $docNode->firstChild;

    // skip any text nodes before the first value node
    while ( $root->nodeName == "#text" ) 
    {
        $root = $root->nextSibling;
    }

    return $this->parse_node($root);
}

function parse_node( $inNode ) 
{
    $valueType  = strtolower($inNode->nodeName);
    $selector   = 'parse_'.$valueType;

    return $this->$selector($inNode);
}

function parse_array( $inNode ) 
{
    $array = array();

    for ( $node = $inNode->firstChild; $node != null; $node = $node->nextSibling ) 
    {
        if ( $node->nodeType == XML_ELEMENT_NODE ) 
        {
            $array[] = $this->parse_node($node);
        }
    }

    return $array;
}

function parse_dict( $inNode ) 
{
    $dict = array();

    // for each child of this node
    for ( $node = $inNode->firstChild; $node != null; $node = $node->nextSibling ) 
    {
        if ( $node->nodeName == "key" ) 
        {
            $key        = $node->textContent;
            $valueNode  = $node->nextSibling;

            // skip text nodes
            while ( $valueNode->nodeType == XML_TEXT_NODE ) 
            {
                $valueNode = $valueNode->nextSibling;
            }

            // recursively parse the children
            $value = $this->parse_node($valueNode);

            $dict[$key] = $value;
        }
    }

    return $dict;
}

function parse_integer( $inNode ) 
{
    return $inNode->textContent;
}

function parse_real( $inNode ) 
{
    return $inNode->textContent;
}

function parse_string( $inNode ) 
{
    return $inNode->textContent;  
}

function parse_date( $inNode ) 
{
    return $inNode->textContent;
}

function parse_true( $inNode ) 
{
    return true;
}

function parse_false( $inNode ) 
{
    return false;
}

}

jf

This almost useful post is missing a crucial piece of information (for me anyway) – namely, how to do the iteration of the file to get the DOMElement objects.

I’ve been messing with reading RSS files, and they have a nice hierarchical structure, but Mac PLists (AlbumData) have this “key-value” pair structure that I came to your page to the hope of finding a good way to deal with. I will keep looking!

thanks!

I tried it on another server, it works fine now. But what can I search for? If I do a echo count ( $array ); its allways 0. So if parse for “serialNumber” or such it should find something or is there a error in my thougts?

I would like to use your script to parse trough a system profile of OS X clients. But after this:

$plistDocument = new DOMDocument(); $plistDocument->load($path);

the scipt stops without a error notification. What is the meaning of this?

You can even stick the functions inside a class, but then you would have to change this part:

if ( is_callable($transformerName) ) { return call_user_func($transformerName, $valueNode); }

into something like this:

if ( is_callable(array($this, $transformerName)) ) { return $this->$transformerName($valueNode); }