plist - A pure Go property list transcoder

A modern Go library for encoding and decoding Apple property list files.

This is a modernized fork of howett.net/plist, updated for idiomatic Go 1.20+ development. See Changes from upstream for details.

Install

go get github.com/moond4rk/plist

Features

• Encode and decode property lists from/to arbitrary Go types
• Supports all four formats: XML, Binary, OpenStep, and GNUStep
• Automatic format detection on decode
• Struct tags (plist:"name,omitempty") for field customization
• Custom marshaler/unmarshaler interfaces
• Zero third-party dependencies

Usage

Encode a struct to XML plist

type SparseBundleHeader struct {
    InfoDictionaryVersion string `plist:"CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion"`
    BandSize              uint64 `plist:"band-size"`
    BackingStoreVersion   int    `plist:"bundle-backingstore-version"`
    DiskImageBundleType   string `plist:"diskimage-bundle-type"`
    Size                  uint64 `plist:"size"`
}

data := &SparseBundleHeader{
    InfoDictionaryVersion: "6.0",
    BandSize:              8388608,
    Size:                  4 * 1048576 * 1024 * 1024,
    DiskImageBundleType:   "com.apple.diskimage.sparsebundle",
    BackingStoreVersion:   1,
}

// Encode to XML with indentation
out, err := plist.MarshalIndent(data, plist.XMLFormat, "\t")

Decode a plist file

f, _ := os.Open("Info.plist")
defer f.Close()

var config map[string]any
decoder := plist.NewDecoder(f)
err := decoder.Decode(&config)
// decoder.Format contains the detected format (XMLFormat, BinaryFormat, etc.)

Marshal to different formats

value := map[string]any{
    "name":    "example",
    "count":   42,
    "enabled": true,
    "tags":    []string{"go", "plist"},
}

xmlBytes, _    := plist.Marshal(value, plist.XMLFormat)
binaryBytes, _ := plist.Marshal(value, plist.BinaryFormat)

Unmarshal from bytes

xmlData := []byte(`<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>name</key>
    <string>example</string>
    <key>count</key>
    <integer>42</integer>
</dict>
</plist>`)

var result map[string]any
format, err := plist.Unmarshal(xmlData, &result)
fmt.Println(format == plist.XMLFormat) // true

Stream encoding

encoder := plist.NewEncoderForFormat(os.Stdout, plist.XMLFormat)
encoder.Indent("\t")
err := encoder.Encode(value)

Supported formats

Constant	Format	Description
XMLFormat	Apple XML	Standard .plist files used by macOS/iOS
BinaryFormat	Apple Binary	Compact binary representation (bplist00)
OpenStepFormat	OpenStep	Legacy NeXTSTEP text format
GNUStepFormat	GNUStep	Extended ASCII format with typed values

Struct tags

type Example struct {
    Name    string `plist:"display_name"`         // custom key name
    Count   int    `plist:"count,omitempty"`       // omit if zero value
    Ignored string `plist:"-"`                     // skip this field
}

Changes from upstream

This fork modernizes howett.net/plist for current Go development practices:

• Go 1.20 minimum - updated from Go 1.12
• Zero dependencies - removed go-flags and yaml.v3 (CLI tools removed)
• Modern Go idioms - any instead of interface{}, //go:build tags, unsafe.String instead of deprecated reflect.StringHeader
• Deprecated APIs removed - replaced io/ioutil with io/os equivalents
• Performance improvements - strings.Builder for text format encoding
• Bug fixes - empty <plist/> now correctly returns an error; stronger test assertions
• CI/Lint - golangci-lint v2 with comprehensive linter configuration
• Dead code removed - Go 1.6/1.7 compatibility shims, AppEngine build variants

Requirements

• Go 1.20+