Application to read/convert XML data
 

First some background. Apple's System Profiler application (exports almost all the hardware info about your machine you could want) can export it's data in XML format, and you can run it from terminal, and pipe the result to a file, which is handy if you want to run a profile without user interaction, and/or remotely.

Now, I have quite a few of these files and they are in XML format, and I'm trying to find an application (PC or Macintosh) that will actually read these files. I've tried Excel, but it won't play ball with them, I've also tried filemaker pro (v8, am download the latest to see if it'll work) and again, no joy.

I'm ideally looking for something database like, or something that would allow me to perform a report, for example, allow me to search for all machines with less than 256MB of RAM.

Any suggestions?

altova xml spy. Don't know if you can do the db/query stuff.. but you can download a demo.

XML Spy might parse it. It's not really XML, it's Apple's own Property List format. It's a bit more verbose, unreadable and less easy to parse than real XML.

You're quite correct it's not "true" XML, which does not really help things. Guess I could write myself a little Applescript to scan through the file and "do something" with it. hmm.

If you're handy with Perl you could use Mac::PropertyList to get the data you need.