A little category to get an NSDictionary from an NSString containing a plist
Posted: | Author: Jörn | Filed under: iOS, Objective-C | Tags: NSDictionary, parsing, plist | 2 Comments »I really like the plist format. Being able to transform a plist file into a NSDictionary with one line of code really appeals to the lazy guy in me. So when our backend developer asked me what my preferred format for server responses would be, I told him to send his responses in plist format. That’s when I came across a little problem: When accessing the response body of the request, all I got was a NSString. The string contained the plist, but it was still a string and not the usual XML structure that you normally get when you open a plist file.
I found a way to parse a NSString into a NSDictionary on StackOverflow (thanks to Peter N Lewis for his answer).
So I decided to write a little category to extend NSDictionary so that it can initialize a NSDictionary with a plist NSString:
|
1 2 3 |
@interface NSDictionary (DictionaryWithString) + (NSDictionary *)dictionaryWithString:(NSString *)string; @end |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 |
#import "NSDictionary+DictionaryWithString.h" @implementation NSDictionary (DictionaryWithString) + (NSDictionary *)dictionaryWithString:(NSString *)string { NSData *data = [string dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; NSString *error; NSPropertyListFormat format; NSDictionary *dict = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:data mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable format:&format errorDescription:&error]; if(!dict){ NSLog(@"ERROR: could not parse NSString: %@",error); [error release]; } return dict; } @end |
Feel free to use it in your own projects.