Eelco Lempsink

@marcedwards Try this in the terminal:

echo '{"test":0.45}' > test.plist plutil -convert xml1 test.plist cat test.plist

As you can see, the way floats are stored in the XML serialization has nothing to do with how artisanal the original JSON was.

Bonus points: edit the XML version back to 0.45 and run the convert command again.

@marcedwards Don’t think those are rounding errors, just an effect of the way that floats are represented in binary. So a human indeed probably entered the values you said, but these representations easily parse to the right binary representation that is closest to that number.

@marcedwards Yes correct. My reaction was to your initial statements: “They’re also full of rounding errors, which makes me thing they were generated by a tool.” Not errors, and yes plist files are not intended to be hand authored and will generally go through a check / formatting step. “A human probably typed 0.033 and 0.45, and rounding errors caused the issue in the screenshot.” This is not true because they are not errors / issues. Apologies for being a reply-guy! 🙈