Forum Archive

Hi,

does anyone know how Pyhtonistas plist files are being encoded? I always assumed that plists are just XML files in UTF-8 encoding. I however do fail reading pythonistas plist files, specifically :

private/var/mobile/Containers/Shared/AppGroup/{Pythonistas app hash}/Library/Preferences/group.pythonista.plist

I do keep getting encoding exceptions: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xd1 in position 8: invalid continuation byte
I did try ascii, utf-8, and utf-16 with no luck.

Plists can be stored in different formats – ASCII (rare nowadays), XML, or binary. You might want to use the plistlib module from the standard library, it should be able to handle all formats.

@omz

thanks, that did work (Python really has a lib for everything):

import plistlib

path = '/private/var/mobile/Containers/Shared/AppGroup/CB0CD8AB-6A20-4ECC-8312-B0822DFFD9A1/Library/Preferences/group.pythonista.plist'

with open(path, 'rb') as f:
    data = plistlib.load(f)

print(data)

The file however does not contain what I did hope for. Any chance you could shed some light on where the currently active theme is being stored? I know where the theme json files are stored, but I am sort of stumped on how to get the active theme.

Ps: I am aware of the theme related editorfunctions, but these have it quirks, which is why I am trying to do it by hand.

What quirks specifically? Anyway, you could look at the source code of the editor module, to see how it gets the current theme (Modules & Templates/Standard Library (3.5)/site-packages/editor.py). In short, it uses NSUserDefaults via objc_util.

Thanks again, I'll see what I can figure out. About the quirks - This little setup shows what I consider quirky - not everything is being styled correctly.

import editor
import ui
import time

class SomeUi(ui.View):
    def __init__(self):
        self.frame = (0, 0, 500, 470)
        self.table_view = ui.TableView(frame=(10, 10, 480, 400))
        self.text_view = ui.TextField(frame=(10, 420, 480, 40))
        self.add_subview(self.table_view)
        self.add_subview(self.text_view)
        editor.apply_ui_theme(self)

def wait(dt=1.0):
    t = time.perf_counter()
    while time.perf_counter() - t < dt:
        pass

op = SomeUi()
op.present('sheet')
wait(3)
op.close()
wait(1)
editor.present_themed(op, style='sheet')

In a more complex setup I have also experieneced that when reading colors from an ui element styled with the editor.apply_ui_theme() before any ui.View.layout() has ran can give you back a wrong color (-1, 1, 1, 1).

Hi,

had some time to poke in editor around. editor.get_theme_dict() does exactly what I want. It should be made officially public (as it is already not internal, but doesn't appear in the autocomplete for some reason). Some mentioning in the docs would also be nice.