Decoding Dictionaries in Swift
Swift’s
Codablesupport is really great for doing this when you’ve got JSON or a Plist, but not all dictionary data ultimately lives in a file.For example, I was recently doing some stuff with the Disk Arbitration framework. This has a
DADiskCopyDescriptioncall which gives you back a dictionary of known keys (many of which may be missing). This dictionary only ever exists in memory.What I really want to do in this situation is extract some of these keys into a structure or object as a way of validating that I have what I need, and discarding anything I don’t need.
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The
Codablesupport would be ideal here, except that as it comes out-of-the-box, it appears that I’d have to convert the dictionary into JSON first in order to convert it back. This seems… non optimal… so I set out to make encoder / decoder classes which just work with dictionaries.
