How to output a .plist's <data> element from a pkl file?

[mobileskyfi]

I'm trying pkl-lang to generate some .plist files. But I do not know how in pkl to express a Data() blob into output of pkl eval -f plist which is a <data> tag in <dict>. For example, this is the output I'd like:

<dict>
	<key>myKey</key>
	<data>
	Bace64E8c0dedDa7a==
	</data>
</dict>

Now I'm not sure what Pkl type - if any - will result in a tag from the PListRenderer(). The desired Base64-encoded data output is fixed – so I don't need to do any encoding.

Is there some Pkl syntax to get a in rendered plist?

Related question, is there a .plist to .pkl converter? Because that might have been able to solve this mystery.

[bioball]

Pkl currently doesn't have a binary type, so, there isn't built-in support for this.

You can, however, use a render directive, which is an escape hatch to get the renderer to behave how you want.

For example:

function plistData(data: String): RenderDirective = new {
  text = """
    <data>\(data)</data>
    """
}

myKey = plistData("Bace64E8c0dedDa7a==")

output {
  renderer = new PListRenderer {}
}

[mobileskyfi]

Thanks! I wasn't sure how to use the various Render* things.

Is there any .plist to .pkl converters?

[HT154]

There aren't really many general-purpose X-to-Pkl converters as it's almost never clear what the correct semantic conversion should be. A converter might make the naïve decision to use a Dynamic or Mapping to represent all keyed containers, but this is less than ideal when idiomatic Pkl should use classes/modules for structured data.

It's certainly possible to build a more bespoke plist-to- converter. This is a well-established pattern, and you can see an example in k8s.contrib.convert. In this case you'd probably want to use plutil or similar to convert the plist to JSON just to make reading the source data simpler.

[mobileskyfi]

Fair enough. I only have one .plist with a few dozen things.

To your point, it forced me to write classes to represent the various plist parts - since I wanted a plist to be a "template" for derivative files anyway. ;)

[bioball]

Update: we're exploring adding a binary type to Pkl, see apple/pkl-evolution#14