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Working With Property Lists In Swift — Part 1
A property list file, better known as a plist file, is a specific kind of file that can store data in key-value pairs. In fact, property list files are XML files simply named differently in the Apple ecosystem. Making a parallelization, plist files are similar to dictionaries in Swift; the collection type that can also store key-value pairs of data.
The best example of a property list file, is the Info.plist in every Xcode project. It contains a big number of default settings, configuration and information regarding the app, but more entries can be added on demand. For example, in order to make use of the device camera, it’s required to add the NSCameraUserDescription key, accompanied with a String value describing the purpose of using the camera.
Property list files can be proved perfect in order to store small amounts of data that can be described as key-value pairs. Just think that user default settings (NSUserDefaults) are stored in such a file in iOS apps. And it’s really easy to perform such tasks programmatically in Swift. In this post I’ll show you how to read from and write to property list files. A further discussion with some more advanced techniques is available in this second post.
