
384 9 Chapter 18: Building Blocks and Types
Property Lists
Property lists use XML to store pairs of property names and
values. They are used pervasively in Mac OS X. Property lists
with their property name/value pairs are similar to dictionar-
ies. In fact, it is simple to convert a property list to a dictio-
nary, and vice versa. On disk, a property list is often an
editable XML text file; when you access it from a program, it
is a standard NSDictionary.
You can use property lists to store dates, numbers, booleans,
and strings. In addition, NSData or CFData types can be
stored in them. Most importantly, arrays and dictionaries