Evil Hack of the Day

MacOS plist XML files are evil; even more so than regular XML. For instance, my iTunes library file consists mostly of entries like:

<key>5436</key>
<dict>
	<key>Track ID</key><integer>5436</integer>
	<key>Name</key><string>Getting Better</string>
	<key>Artist</key><string>The Beatles</string>
	<key>Composer</key><string>Paul McCartney/John Lennon</string>
	<key>Album</key><string>Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band</string>
	…
</dict>

You’ll notice that there’s no connection between a key and its value, other than proximity. There’s no real indication that these are fields in a data record, and unlike most XML files, you have to consider the position of each element compared to its neighbors. It’s almost as if someone took a file of the form

Track_ID = 5436
Name = "Getting Better"
Artist = "The Beatles"
Coposer = "Paul McCartney/John Lennon"

and, when told to convert it to XML in the name of buzzword-compliance, did a simple and quarter-assed search and replace.

But of course, what was fucked up by (lossless) text substitution can be unfucked by text substitution. And what’s the buzzword-compliant tool for doing text substitution on XML, even crappy XML? XSLT, of course. The template language that combines the power of sed with the terseness of COBOL.

So I hacked up an XSLT template to convert my iTunes library into a file that can be required in a Perl script. Feel free to use it in good or ill health. If you spring it on unsuspecting developers, please send me a photo of their reaction.