webloc is a Ruby library that can read from and write to .webloc files as used on macOS. These are a variant of 'plist' format files, specifically used for storing links to URLs.
It works on Ruby 3.0 and up (including Ruby 4.0.2 and TruffleRuby) and supports URLs of up to 2048 characters in length (and probably longer, but this is around the de facto limit for URLs in most systems).
gem install webloc
Reading a .webloc file:
webloc = Webloc.load('bookmark.webloc')
puts webloc.url
# => "https://example.com"
Writing to a .webloc file:
Webloc.new('https://rubyweekly.com/').save('rubyweekly.webloc')
require 'webloc' begin webloc = Webloc.load('suspicious.webloc') puts webloc.url rescue Webloc::FileNotFoundError => e puts "File not found: #{e.message}" rescue Webloc::CorruptedFileError => e puts "File is corrupted: #{e.message}" rescue Webloc::InvalidFormatError => e puts "Invalid file format: #{e.message}" rescue Webloc::WeblocError => e puts "General webloc error: #{e.message}" end
require 'webloc' require 'uri' def create_webloc_safely(url, filename) # Basic URL validation uri = URI.parse(url) unless uri.is_a?(URI::HTTP) || uri.is_a?(URI::HTTPS) puts "Invalid URL scheme: #{url}" return false end # Create the webloc file Webloc.new(url).save(filename) puts "Created #{filename} for #{url}" true rescue URI::InvalidURIError puts "Invalid URL format: #{url}" false rescue Webloc::WeblocError => e puts "Failed to create webloc: #{e.message}" false end create_webloc_safely('https://example.com', 'example.webloc') create_webloc_safely('invalid-url', 'invalid.webloc')
require 'webloc' require 'json' # Convert webloc to JSON webloc = Webloc.load('bookmark.webloc') json_data = { url: webloc.url, title: File.basename('bookmark.webloc', '.webloc') } File.write('bookmark.json', JSON.pretty_generate(json_data)) # Convert JSON back to webloc json_content = JSON.parse(File.read('bookmark.json')) Webloc.new(json_content['url']).save('restored.webloc')
Thanks is due to Christos Karaiskos for this article which helped me understand the plist format a bit more when fixing a bug in 2024.
Copyright (C) 2011-2026 Peter Cooper
webloc is licensed under the terms of the MIT License