The Reluctant Blogger

Here’s a new utility  for OSX Lion I threw together to convert a plist file to a JSON file.

It takes a single argument, which is an absolute or relative path to a plist file. The output of this application will be a JSON file written in the same directory of the plist.

int main (int argc, const char * argv[])
{

    @autoreleasepool {

        if(argc < 2)
        {
            printf("Not enough arguments; missing plist file.\n");
            return 1;
        }

        NSFileManager *filemgr;
        NSString *currentpath;

        filemgr = [[NSFileManager alloc] init];

        currentpath = [filemgr currentDirectoryPath];

        // try to find the full path to the spcified file.
        NSString* path = [NSString stringWithCString:argv[1] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
        if(![filemgr fileExistsAtPath:path])
        {
            // path was not absolute or did not exist. Try looking in the current path. 
            path = [currentpath stringByAppendingPathComponent:path];

            if(![filemgr fileExistsAtPath:path])
            {
                printf("Could not find file %s\n", argv[1]);
                return 1;
            }
        }

        NSDictionary* dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:path];
        if (nil == dictionary) {
            printf("Could not parse plist file %s\n", argv[1]);
            return 1;
        }

        NSError* error = nil;

        NSData* data = [NSJSONSerialization dataWithJSONObject:dictionary options:NSJSONWritingPrettyPrinted error:&error];

        if(nil == data)
        {
            NSString* errorMessage = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"There was an error converting to JSON: %@", error];
            printf("%s", [errorMessage cStringUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);
            return 1;
        }

        path = [path stringByAppendingPathExtension:@"json"];

        if (![data writeToFile:path atomically:YES]) {
            printf("Error writing to file: %s", [path cStringUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]);
            return 1;
        }

    }
    return 0;
}