catplist 0.0.6

Description:

catplist 0.0.6

catplist
catplist is a small python utility to print apple plists
(Information Property List)
in a readable and comprehensible manner.
Rationale
While plistutil exists to convert plists from binary to xml and vice versa plists are usually still hard to
read for humans or parse from the command line with tools like grep. catplist aims to make this task easier.
It's main focus is to print a human-readable and parsable representation of the plist. Additionally, plists
often contain binary data, or some strange nested key value structures originating from
NSArchiver
or NSKeyedArchiver serialization.
catplist aims to deliver a good readable representation by unwrapping those structures.
Try it on some Metadata out of your iPhone Photo library like *.albummetadata, *.memorymetadata, *.facemetadata,
*.foldermetadata or just regular *.plist files.
For editing and more accurate/original representation of plists or search for PlistBuddy, XCode, plutil.
Features

wildcard support
recurse into directories with option --recurse
reads binary and xml plists
NSKeyedArchiver: unpacks NSKeyedArchiver plists that just add an layer of indirectness into the key value store.
Nested plists: in some plists apple stores plist as a value. catplist unwraps those nested plists.
Interpretation of some of Binary Data stored within plists, usually consisting of:

UUID data
xz compressed data
binary plists



Usage
catplist myplist.plist

> catplist --help
Usage: catplist [OPTIONS] [FILE]...

This is catplist: print plists for human reading and easy grepping.

Options:
-R, --raw print raw plist contents, will not unpack
nested data & plists
-r, --recurse recurse into subdirs, reads all files ignores
non plist files
-f, --format [python|json|yaml]
format output in ...
--help Show this message and exit.



Install
Installation via PyPi:
pip install catplist

Known Bugs

valid plists with a date in year 0 will not be read since the underlying python
datetime implementation is currently not allowing year 0 dates.
See also Python Issue 41083