I'm reading an itunes generated xml playlist with plistib. The xml has a utf8 header.
When I read the xml with plistib, I get both unicode (e.g., 'Name': u'Don\u2019t You Remember') and byte strings (e.g., 'Name': 'Where Eagles Dare').
Standard advice is to decode what you read with the correct encoding as soon as possible and use unicode within the program. However,
unicode_string.decode('utf8')
fails (as it should) with
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
The solution would seem to be:
for name in names:
if isinstance(name, str):
name = name.decode('utf8')
# etc.
Is this the correct way of dealing with the problem? Is there a better way?
I'm on windows 7.
EDIT:
xml read with:
import plistlib
xml = plistlb.readPlist(fn)
for track in xml['Tracks']:
info = xml['Tracks'][track]
info['Name']
Produces in idle:
u'Don\u2019t You Remember'
'Where Eagles Dare'
Here's the xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Major Version</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Minor Version</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Date</key><date>2013-08-14T15:04:27Z</date>
<key>Application Version</key><string>10.6.3</string>
<key>Features</key><integer>5</integer>
<key>Show Content Ratings</key><true/>
<key>Music Folder</key><string>file://localhost/C:/Users/rdp/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/</string>
<key>Library Persistent ID</key><string>FE28CCACD9A36C34</string>
<key>Tracks</key>
<dict>
<key>1019</key>
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>1019</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Where Eagles Dare</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Iron Maiden</string>
<key>Album</key><string>Piece Of Mind</string>
<key>Genre</key><string>Rock</string>
<key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
<key>Size</key><integer>7372755</integer>
<key>Total Time</key><integer>370128</integer>
<key>Track Number</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Year</key><integer>1983</integer>
<key>Date Modified</key><date>2009-10-07T21:11:31Z</date>
<key>Date Added</key><date>2008-02-07T16:04:15Z</date>
<key>Bit Rate</key><integer>153</integer>
<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
<key>Play Count</key><integer>4</integer>
<key>Play Date</key><integer>3414416760</integer>
<key>Play Date UTC</key><date>2012-03-12T21:06:00Z</date>
<key>Artwork Count</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Persistent ID</key><string>FE28CCACD9A383E5</string>
<key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/D:/music/Iron%20Maiden/Piece%20Of%20Mind/01%20Where%20Eagles%20Dare.mp3</string>
<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
</dict>
<key>11559</key>
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>11559</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Don’t You Remember</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Adele</string>
<key>Album</key><string>21</string>
<key>Genre</key><string>Pop</string>
<key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
<key>Size</key><integer>6120028</integer>
<key>Total Time</key><integer>229511</integer>
<key>Track Number</key><integer>4</integer>
<key>Track Count</key><integer>11</integer>
<key>Year</key><integer>2011</integer>
<key>Date Modified</key><date>2012-11-17T10:50:31Z</date>
<key>Date Added</key><date>2012-12-19T16:03:46Z</date>
<key>Bit Rate</key><integer>199</integer>
<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
<key>Artwork Count</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Persistent ID</key><string>7130C888606FB153</string>
<key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/D:/music/Adele/21/04%20-%20Don%E2%80%99t%20You%20Remember.mp3</string>
<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
<key>Playlists</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>Name</key><string>short</string>
<key>Playlist ID</key><integer>30888</integer>
<key>Playlist Persistent ID</key><string>166746C6572B0005</string>
<key>All Items</key><true/>
<key>Playlist Items</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>11559</integer>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>1019</integer>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
Wow this is a really weird behaviour. I would even say that this non-uniform behaviour is a bug in the 2.X implementation of the plistlib. The plistlib in Python 3 always returns unicode strings which is much better.
But you have to live with it :) So the answer to your question is yes. You should protect yourself always when reading a string from a plist
def safe_unicode(s):
if isinstance(s, unicode):
return s
return s.decode('utf-8', errors='replace')
value = safe_unicode(info['Name'])
I added the errors='replace' just in case the string is not utf-8 encoded. You'll get a bunch of \ufffd characters if it cannot be decoded. If you rather get an exception just leave it out and use e.decode('utf-8').
Update:
When I tried with ElementTree:
from xml.etree import ElementTree as et
tree = et.parse('test.plist')
map(lambda x: x.text, tree.findall('dict/dict/dict')[1].findall('string'))
Which gave me:
[u'Don\u2019t You Remember',
'Adele',
'21',
'Pop',
'MPEG audio file',
'7130C888606FB153',
'File',
'file://localhost/D:/music/Adele/21/04%20-%20Don%E2%80%99t%20You%20Remember.mp3']
So there are unicode and byte string mixed :-/