The macOS / iOS Plist Viewer opens Apple property list files and renders their contents as a clear, navigable tree. Property lists are Apple’s standard format for storing structured configuration and app data — preferences, Info.plist metadata, cached state and more. They come in two flavours, human-readable XML and compact binary, and this tool handles both directly in the browser.
How it works
The viewer first checks the file’s leading bytes. If they spell bplist, it parses the binary format; otherwise it parses XML.
For XML plists, the browser’s built-in DOMParser reads the document, and the tool maps each element to a value: <true/> and <false/> become booleans, <integer> and <real> become numbers, <string> and <date> become their text, <array> becomes a list, and <dict> pairs alternating key and value elements.
For binary plists, the format is more involved. A 32-byte trailer at the end of the file records the offset-table entry size, the object-reference size, the number of objects, the index of the top object and where the offset table starts. Each object’s first byte is a marker whose high nibble is the type (integer, real, date, data, ASCII or UTF-16 string, array, dictionary) and whose low nibble is either a small length or a flag to read an extended length. The tool follows object references recursively to rebuild the full tree.
Tips and notes
- Binary dates use seconds since
2001-01-01, not the Unix epoch — the tool converts them for you. - Strings can be stored as ASCII or UTF-16 big-endian; both are decoded correctly.
- Need machine-readable output instead of a tree? Use the companion Plist to JSON converter.
Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.