Read Safari Bookmark

On Mac, Safari bookmarks are stored in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist.

Permission

It's not readable directly. To read the file, we need to open a dialog to let user select the folder ~/Library/Safari/, then read the file.

This is only the first step, bypass permission.

Then we need to parse the plist file.

Parse plist file

May need to copy the plist file to another folder first so other processes can read it.

The following crates can parse plist file:

• Rust plist crate: https://crates.io/crates/plist
• Python plistlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/plistlib.html

But in my scenario, I can't directly use them. I am in a browser environment (tauri).

On Mac, the built-in /usr/bin/python3 comes with plistlib.

To get the full code in python, ask CharGPT, it could easily given you the parser code.

Another option is to use mac's built-in command plutil.

The available formats are xml1, binary1, json, swift, objc.

json format doesn't seem to work, xml1 format works.

After converting to xml1 format, it's easy to convert to json with any language.

plutil -convert xml1 -o - ./Bookmarks.plist
plutil -convert xml1 -o output.xml  ./Bookmarks.plist