Command-line tool for converting PLIST to JSON?

Question

Is there a command line tool available for converting .plist files to JSON?

If not, what would be the approach for creating one using Objective-C or C on a Mac? For instance, there is JSONKit, for Objective-C. How would one go about opening a .plist file, pass it to JSONKit, and serialize that as JSON?

score 178 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 02 '23 at 07:43

178

If you are on a Mac you can use the plutil tool on the command line (this comes with the developer tools I believe):

plutil -convert json -o Data.json Data.plist

If you want to just overwrite the existing file, you can omit the -o parameter:

plutil -convert json Data.plist

edited Aug 02 '23 at 07:43

mwfearnley

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answered Jun 12 '12 at 06:46

Dylan

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This will overwrite the original plist. To prevent this command from overwriting the original file pass the `-o` flag. ie `plutil -convert json Data.plist -o Data.json` – ADAM Feb 12 '13 at 08:03
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One complication with this is that some Plist data types cannot be converted by plutil. The workaround I found was to do some pre-processing on the plist before passing it to plutil. Specific to the plist that I'm working with, I had to replace both `` and `` tags with ``. – dandean May 15 '13 at 05:01
I don't know on what Macs this is supposed to work, but on 10.6 it says: `Unknown format specifier: json` – Tobia May 25 '13 at 10:31
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Your second command will convert the original plist file all the same. It should be `plutil -convert json -o Data.json Data.plist`. That's to say, the original plist file should be at last. @ADAM – DawnSong Jan 05 '16 at 14:57
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use `plutil -convert -r json` to receive the json in a human-readable format – Marcel Zanoni May 31 '16 at 14:39
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Pass a hyphen as the output file to print to stdout. `plutil -convert json -o - file.json` – BallpointBen Apr 05 '19 at 13:12
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You need to edit your answer and completely remove the 1st command, which destructively modifies the original plist file. It is simply wrong for this purpose. – kungfuspider Feb 28 '23 at 23:52

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered May 21 '11 at 02:56

The following gets the job done—

// convertPlistToJSON.m
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import "JSONKit.h"

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

  if(argc != 3) { fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s FILE_PLIST FILE_JSON\n", argv[0]); exit(5); }

  NSString *plistFileNameString = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:argv[1]];
  NSString *jsonFileNameString  = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:argv[2]];

  NSError *error = NULL;

  NSData *plistFileData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:plistFileNameString options:0UL error:&error];
  if(plistFileData == NULL) {
    NSLog(@"Unable to read plist file.  Error: %@, info: %@", error, [error userInfo]);
    exit(1);
  }

  id plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListWithData:plistFileData options:NSPropertyListImmutable format:NULL error:&error];
  if(plist == NULL) {
    NSLog(@"Unable to deserialize property list.  Error: %@, info: %@", error, [error userInfo]);
    exit(1);
  }

  NSData *jsonData = [plist JSONDataWithOptions:JKSerializeOptionPretty error:&error];
  if(jsonData == NULL) {
    NSLog(@"Unable to serialize plist to JSON.  Error: %@, info: %@", error, [error userInfo]);
    exit(1);
  }

  if([jsonData writeToFile:jsonFileNameString options:NSDataWritingAtomic error:&error] == NO) {
    NSLog(@"Unable to write JSON to file.  Error: %@, info: %@", error, [error userInfo]);
    exit(1);
  }

  [pool release]; pool = NULL;
  return(0);
}

It does some reasonable error checking, but it's not bullet proof. Use at your own risk.

You'll need JSONKit to build the tool. Place JSONKit.m and JSONKit.h in the same directory as convertPlistToJSON.m, and then compile with:

shell% gcc -o convertPlistToJSON convertPlistToJSON.m JSONKit.m -framework Foundation

Usage:

shell% convertPlistTOJSON
usage: convertPlistToJSON FILE_PLIST FILE_JSON

shell% convertPlistTOJSON input.plist output.json

Reads in input.plist, and writes the pretty printed JSON to output.json.

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 12 '22 at 21:11

If you run into issues with "invalid object in plist for destination format", you probably have bytes-like data in the plist, which plutil does not consider serializable to json.

Python has built-in plist support, and we can specify a custom default function to specify what to do when serialization fails (e.g. on bytes). If you don't care about the bytes fields, we can just serialize them as '<not serializable>' with the following python one-liner:

python -c 'import plistlib,sys,json; print(json.dumps(plistlib.loads(sys.stdin.read().encode("utf-8")), default=lambda o:"<not serializable>"))'

This takes the stdin, parses the plist, then dumps it to json. For example, to get current power information for your Mac, you can run:

ioreg -rw0 -c AppleSmartBattery -a | python -c 'import plistlib,sys,json; print(json.dumps(plistlib.loads(sys.stdin.read().encode("utf-8")), default=lambda o:"<not serializable>"))'

and if you wanted to just get the current charging wattage, you could pipe that into jq '.[0].AdapterDetails.Watts'

Lal Krishna · Answer 4 · 2019-09-20T06:13:43.977

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Using mac utils

Convert plist to json

plutil -convert json -o output.json input.plist

Convert json to plist

plutil -convert xml1 input.json -o output.plist

edited Sep 20 '19 at 06:13

answered Jun 03 '19 at 15:03

Lal Krishna

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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 30 '14 at 15:27

There is a native way, to convert plist's to json. It's called NSJSONSerialization.

Here is an example on how to use it, and convert a plist file to a json file:

NSDictionary *plistDict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:@"input.plist"];

NSError *error;
NSData *jsonData = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:plistDict options:NSJSONWritingPrettyPrinted error:&error];
NSString *jsonString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:jsonData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
[jsonString writeToFile:@"output.json" atomically:NO encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&error];

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered May 20 '11 at 02:36

The code is fairly simple to do this:

NSArray* array = [[NSArray arrayWithContentsOfFile:[@"~/input.plist" stringByExpandingTildeInPath]]retain];
SBJsonWriter* writer = [[SBJsonWriter alloc] init];
NSString* s = [[writer stringWithObject:array] retain];
[s writeToFile:[@"~/output.json" stringByExpandingTildeInPath] atomically:YES];
[array release];

I never got around to making it accept arguments as I only needed to do 3 files.

Artem · Answer 7 · 2021-07-17T22:50:05.047

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Converts Filename.plist to Filename.json:

plutil -convert json -r -e json Filename.plist

-convert indicates format, -r makes the output more human-readable, -e specifies an extension

edited Jul 17 '21 at 22:50

answered Aug 30 '20 at 11:41

Artem

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score 2 · Answer 8 · answered Dec 31 '11 at 20:47

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I wrote a tool in python to do this. See here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/plist2json

Works from command line on os x or linux distros, batch converts a directory. It's short and simple so it should be easy to modify for your own purposes.

answered Dec 31 '11 at 20:47

Rab

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Command-line tool for converting PLIST to JSON?

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