(imported comment written by BenKus)
Here is some info straight from our Mac Developer:
The XML inspectors are windows only as they use Windows XML parsing APIs.
But the Mac has special .plist inspectors which are even better for this case. You want to use "dictionary of ", and then:
“array of dictionary”
“string of dictionary”
“integer of dictionary”
“bool of dictionary”
“keys of dictionary”
or
"string 2 of "
"int 3 of "
etc. See the inspector language guide for the full set of inspectors.
This way you can get at arbitrary data in trees of .plist data.
For the question they asked the .plist is quite simple (flat, no hierarchy, and all strings) so a simple query would be:
string “Text2” of dictionary of file “/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist”
A more complex query might be:
string 3 of array “TB Item Identifiers” of dictionary “NSToolar Configuration SafariToolbarIdentifier” of dictionary of file “/Users/Bob/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist”
These inspectors become quite useful when used in conjunction with the iokit registry inspector which will give you a dictionary for any of the nodes of any of the planes of the iokit registry:
keys of node “memory-map” of node “chosen” of dictionary of devicetree plane of iokit registry
or
keys of node “chosen/memory-map” of dictionary of devicetree plane of iokit registry
Point of trivia that may be of use: The “cstring” inspector is used in cases where Apple (or other person who created the file) has chosen to store strings not as the “string” type but as the “data” type. If you grab it as “string” or “data” then you get the NULL included, whereas if you happen to know that data field will always have a null terminated string in it, you can use the “cstring” inspector to get what you want. We added this type because this came up in the iokit registry quite often:
Q: string “manufacturer” of dictionary of devicetree plane of iokit registry
A: Apple Computer, Inc.%00
Q: cstring “manufacturer” of dictionary of devicetree plane of iokit registry
A: Apple Computer, Inc.