This class is deprecated in favor of NSPropertyListSerialization . It provides a means of recovering a property list (NSArray or NSDictionary plus limited contents) from a byte-array (actually string) representation.

This class is deprecated in favor of NSPropertyListSerialization .

It provides a means of producing a byte-array (actually string) representation of a property list (NSArray or NSDictionary plus limited contents).

GNUstep extends deserialization by having the option to make the resulting data more compact by ensuring that repeated strings are only stored once. If the property-list has a lot of repeated strings in it, this will be more space efficient but it will be slower (though other parts of your code may speed up through more efficient equality testing of uniqued strings). The default is NOT to deserialize uniqued strings.

The [+uniquing:] method turns uniquing on/off. Uniquing is done using a global NSCountedSet - see its documentation for details.

GNUstep extends serialization by having the option to make the resulting data more compact by ensuring that repeated strings are only stored once. If the property-list has a lot of repeated strings in it, this will be both faster and more space efficient but it will be slower if the property-list has few repeated strings. The default is NOT to generate compact versions of the data. The [+shouldBeCompact:] method sets default behavior. The [+serializePropertyList:intoData:compact:] method lets you override the default behavior.

Objects that are not standard property list constituents can adopt this protocol to allow themselves to be serialized by an NSSerializer and deserialized by an NSDeserializer . Note, this mechanism has been deprecated and you should instead use NSArchiver and related facilities to serialize objects that are not ordinary property lists.