Re: XML plists ?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Wednesday, September 5, 2001, at 11:01 PM, Marko Mikulicic wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I tried to set XML property lists.
> After I wrote "defaults write NSGlobalDomain 
> GSMacOSXCompatiblePropertyLists"
> (twice to get an XML .GNUstepDefaults)
> my .GNUstepDefaults looks like this:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM 
> "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd">
> <plist version="0.9">
> <dict>
>     <key>NSGlobalDomain</key>
>     <dict>
>         <key>GSMacOSXCompatiblePropertyLists</key>
>         <string>yes</string>
>     </dict>
> </dict>
> </plist>
>
> but any gnustep program complains:
>
> .:1: error: Extra content at the end of the document

I think I traced that one down a few months ago and found that the iconv 
code in libc
(used for handling UTF8 encoded data - which is what property lists are) 
failed
on long strings.  To fix this you need to install a newer libc (if you 
are brave),
get a separate iconv library and rebuild the base library configured to 
use this (I
haven't tried that), upgrade your operating system, or as a hack you
can modify the GSPropertyList() function in NSString.m to use 
NSASCIIStringEncoding
rather than NSUTF8StringEncoding - which will be fine as long as you 
don't have any
non-ascii characters in your property list.


> How can NSUserDefaults know to read .GNUstepDefaults in XML format
> if that information is stored in that file itself ?
> Does it (or should) read the "<?xml" stuff ?

Yes.

> Maybe I must recompile all with some flag?
>
> I would like to use external XML editors to play with property lists
> but I really like the objc interface with dictionaries so I don't want
> to use libxml directly.
>  Is XML support in gnustep still unfinished ?

I'd call it beta ... since I'm not sure how it *should* behave ...
At the moment, with XML output turned on, you get XML descriptions of all
property list objects, and I think it might be nicer if XML was only 
produced
when saving to file.
However, the generation and parsing of XML property lists seems to work 
fine.

> Can I instruct NSDictionary to read and write a plist in XML while
> preserving defaults as normal plists ?

No - since defaults are implemented by reading and writing dictionaries.