I’m trying to find out if I can pull the NSData from a property list to get the original binary data back. I want to do this from a non-Cocoa (and non-Mac) environment. I’ve got the property list (a NSDictionary) which contains the NSData, which looks like base64 data (am I right?), so can I simply decode that somehow to get the data I want (assuming I’m correct that it is base64) from the plist?

Not practical - it is base64 encoded, but the data is a stream of some sort, probably a CoreFoundation object, used to encode the data.

That’s not true at all. The data is directly base64 encoded, so it’s definitely possible to decode it into the original binary data. I do this often on non-Mac platforms and I’ve never had a problem.

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I think the above poster meant that the binary data is probably encoded by some CF object, so just base64-decoding the data doesn’t help you much. Of course, only you can really tell that (by decoding the base64 data).

That is what happened - I needlessly archived the data object before it was put into the plist. Not archiving it now allows me to decode it directly.