Written by
HK
At
Thu Nov 21 2024
On Mac, Safari bookmarks are stored in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist.
Permission
It's not readable directly. To read the file, we need to open a dialog to let user select the folder ~/Library/Safari/, then read the file.
This is only the first step, bypass permission.
Then we need to parse the plist file.
Parse plist file
May need to copy the plist file to another folder first so other processes can read it.
The following crates can parse plist file:
- Rust plist crate: https://crates.io/crates/plist
- Python plistlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/plistlib.html
But in my scenario, I can't directly use them. I am in a browser environment (tauri).
On Mac, the built-in /usr/bin/python3 comes with plistlib.
To get the full code in python, ask CharGPT, it could easily given you the parser code.
Another option is to use mac's built-in command plutil.
The available formats are xml1, binary1, json, swift, objc.
json format doesn't seem to work, xml1 format works.
After converting to xml1 format, it's easy to convert to json with any language.
How is this guide?