Cocoa NSTask ouput extraction - swift

Question

I want to run this command system_profiler -xml SPUSBDataType in my Cocoa application. After doing it with the help of NSTask i get the following output by encoding fileHandle output to a NSString. But i can't do the extraction of specific key's value. I tried by converting it into xml using SWXMLHash and converting to JSON using jsonSerializer. But it become more complex.
Is there any way to do this?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
<dict>
<key>_SPCommandLineArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/sbin/system_profiler</string>
<string>-nospawn</string>
<string>-xml</string>
<string>SPCameraDataType</string>
<string>-detailLevel</string>
<string>full</string>
</array>
<key>_SPCompletionInterval</key>
<real>0.13360595703125</real>
<key>_SPResponseTime</key>
<real>0.22787702083587646</real>
<key>_dataType</key>
<string>SPCameraDataType</string>
<key>_detailLevel</key>
<integer>-1</integer>
<key>_items</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>_name</key>
<string>FaceTime HD Camera</string>
<key>spcamera_model-id</key>
<string>Apple Camera VendorID_0x106B ProductID_0x1570</string>
<key>spcamera_unique-id</key>
<string>CC89657KQR6GDV4AQ</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
</plist>

Answer 1

You should be able to parse this output directly using PropertyListSerialization
. Check out the documentation.
I'd recommend maybe taking a look at using IOKit instead. It can be a bit of a daunting API to get a handle on, but it provides a ton of power. I've used it for USB device information and connect/disconnect notifications in the past and it's worked wonderfully. I think you'll find it much more robust than parsing the output of a command line utility.

Answer 2

You can use something like below to get the Array with the containing Dictionary.
let url = Bundle.main.url(forResource: "data", withExtension: "plist")!
let plistData = try! Data(contentsOf: url)
if let array = try! PropertyListSerialization.propertyList(from: plistData, options: [], format: nil) as? [[String:Any]] {
print(array)
}