plist-native

Light, fast & memory efficient plist parser/builder that relies on libxmljs.

Quick start

Install the libxml2-dev package required by libxmljs on your system.

Parsing a plist from file/string

var plist = require('plist-native');

var obj = plist.parse(fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/myPlist.plist')); // parses a buffer

var obj2 = plist.parseString('<plist><string>Hello World!</string></plist>'); // parses a string

Building a plist from an object:

var plist = require('plist-native');

var buffer = plist.build({'foo' : 'bar'}); // returns a buffer

var str = plist.buildString({'foo' : 'bar'}); // returns a string

Benchmarks

Speed benchmark with debug working with a 13MB iTunes.xml plist library file:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   | library      | engine (dep)  | size (lines)  | parsing       | building      |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1 | plist-native | libxmljs      | 106           | 2s638ms       | 3s139ms       |
| 2 | plist        | xmlbuilder    | 297           | 5s202ms +97%  | 3s698ms +18%  |
| 3 | xml2js       | sax           | 254           | 6s887ms +161% | n/a           |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Memory benchmark with memwatch working with a 13MB iTunes.xml plist library file:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   | library      | engine (dep)  | size (lines)  | parsing       | building      |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1 | plist-native | libxmljs      | 106           | 52.86mb       | 16.78mb       |
| 2 | plist        | xmlbuilder    | 297           | 53.30mb +1%   | 156.34mb (?!) |
| 3 | xml2js       | sax           | 254           | 61.87mb +17%  | n/a           |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Testing

node-plist-native is tested with nodeunit.

npm install --dev
npm test

Contributing

Please submit all pull requests the against master branch. If your unit test contains javascript patches or features, you should include relevant unit tests. Thanks!

Authors

Olivier Louvignes

Copyright and license

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2012 Olivier Louvignes

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.