Introduction to Property Lists

Explains how to use structured, textual representations of data in Cocoa.

Organization of This Document

This document consists of the following chapters:

Quick Start for Property Lists is a mini-tutorial on property lists, giving you a “hands-on” familiarity with XML property lists and the Objective-C serialization API.

About Property Lists explains what property lists are and when you should use them.

Creating Property Lists Programmatically shows how you can create hierarchically structured property lists using the APIs of Cocoa and Core Foundation.

Understanding XML Property Lists describes the format of XML property lists.

Serializing a Property List discusses how to serialize and deserialize property lists between their runtime and static representations).

Reading and Writing Property-List Data describes how to save property lists to files or URL resources and how to restore them later.

Old-Style ASCII Property Lists is an appendix that describes the format of old-style (OpenStep) ASCII property lists.