solved plist SyntaxError

[_Rf]

Hey all Alfreds,

 

I have some strange behaviour here I can't explain, then I wouldn't be qualified to do so anyways:

 

Yesterday I updated one of my macs (A) to Ventura, the other (B) is still on Monterey. Both are running Alfred 5.0.3

(A) is running python 3.11, (B) 3.09

 

I have a workflow to log my working hours. It writes the hours to one text file per project. The current or most recent project names are stored in the workflows variables. I call python scripts in my workflow. 

Everything worked fine until yesterday: 

On both machines (synced via Dropbox) the workflow plist storing the variables can't be read anymore. 

 

(A):

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/rf/Desktop/testFileOp.py", line 13, in <module>

    info = pl.load(fp)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/python3.11/plistlib.py", line 864, in load
    if info['detect'](header):
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/python3.11/plistlib.py", line 410, in _is_fmt_xml
    if header.startswith(pfx):
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: startswith first arg must be str or a tuple of str, not bytes

 

I can't tell if this has anything to do with Alfred 5.0.3 (Build 2087), don't recall when I did the update. Or Ventura (only one mac) or python 3.11 (again only one updated).

The plist of other workflows give me the same error. 

 

As hinted above, I don't really know what I am doing, but it worked until very recently and I don't find any similar posts here or documented changes in python.

 

Thanks for your help, for now I have to manually write my hours in that text doc, like an animal (!) - so really urgent.

 

[Stephen_C]

13 minutes ago, _Rf said:

On both machines (synced via Dropbox)

There are two posts that might possibly help you:

 

One from the developers of Alfred

 

One solution discovered by another user

 

Stephen

[_Rf]

Thanks for the quick answer. I don't think it's this. The folders haven't changed, all files are there and up to date.

I can print(plist.read()) but not load(plist). So maybe it's not a Alfred problem unless something about the Alfred plists has changed and made them incompatible with plistlib.

[vitor]

The problem will be with the Python code. Alfred’s plists haven’t changed, and neither has the Python version shipping with Ventura (something else in the distribution might).

[_Rf]

OK! Me, very stupid. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction:

 

with open(workflowPath + 'info.plist', 'wb') as fp:

...

wb like write-bytes! As required since python 3.4 or so. Must have changed that at some point during my "improvements".

 

Please close this embarrassing thread, there is no bug here, but me!