You Can Export Safari Reading List Using Apple Shortcuts

December 05, 2022

From MacStories:

Now that it’s available on macOS, Shortcuts can get access to application support files that are kept private and hidden from users on iOS and iPadOS. More specifically, I remembered that Safari for Mac has long stored its bookmarks and Reading List items in a file called Bookmarks.plist, which folks have been able to read via AppleScript for years. Under the hood, a .plist file is nothing but a fancy dictionary, and we know that Shortcuts has excellent support for parsing dictionaries and extracting data from them.

Trying this shortcut is the first time I really understood the power of this platform. I was looking for a way to share what was in my reading list with the blog, and now I have one critical step covered. I just need to reformat the output in YAML and create a template to add to the blog. Neat!

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.