In a new iPhone app I am currently developing I needed to be able to import the data from a plist file (apple’s XML formatted file) stored within the app bundle and display it in my app. Luckily there is a very handy class method in the NSDictionary class which enables you to create a Dictionary (basically an array with key values) from a file.
NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:file];

As I wanted to be able to iterate through all the values in the plist, I created a main dictionary named “database” then within that an array which stored another dictionary that holds my key based data.

This is the code I used to open the plist file and iterate though all the values it contains:

NSString *file = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"list_of_dogs" ofType:@"plist"];
        NSDictionary *dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:file];
        
        NSArray *dogArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithArray:[dict objectForKey:@"database"]];
        
        
        for (NSDictionary *sectionDict in dogArray){
          
            //loop through the data from the plist
            
            
           NSLog(@"Dog Name = %@ ",[sectionDict objectForKey:@"dog_name"]);   
           NSLog(@"Dog Type = %@ ",[sectionDict objectForKey:@"dog_type"]);  


         
            
            
        }

This is the XML format of the plist file I created:

<?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">
<dict>
	<key>database</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>dog_name</key>
			<string>Jasper</string>
			<key>dog_type</key>
			<string>Great Dane</string>
			
		</dict>
		<dict>
			<key>dog_name</key>
			<string>Samd</string>
			<key>dog_type</key>
			<string>Jack Russell</string>
			
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

Any questions? hit me up in the comments