ICloud – How to clear ALL items from Safari’s reading list

I had this same idea a few months ago. I came up with a solution that works, using Ruby.

I use this gist to parse the Safari Reading List plist file: https://gist.github.com/andphe/3232343

Then I use the ruby Pocket gem to add each item to Pocket.

In the end, I went with Pinboard instead of Pocket, and I have a working project up on github that does exactly that, except using Pinboard.

The example code that you'd benefit from is: https://github.com/prokizzle/pinboard_tools/blob/master/lib/srl_to_pinboard.rb

What you'd ideally do to make it automatic is have Hazel monitor the Safari Reading List plist file for changes, and then run the ruby script if it's recently modified. That way, every item will make it from SRL to your read later service of choice.

Hope that helps.

I whipped up a Python script to read the plist file referenced in the question patrix mentioned in the comments.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import plistlib
from shutil import copy
import subprocess
import os
from tempfile import gettempdir
import sys
import atexit

BOOKMARKS_PLIST = '~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist'
bookmarksFile = os.path.expanduser(BOOKMARKS_PLIST)

# Make a copy of the bookmarks and convert it from a binary plist to text
tempDirectory = gettempdir()
copy(bookmarksFile, tempDirectory)
bookmarksFileCopy = os.path.join(tempDirectory, os.path.basename(bookmarksFile))

def removeTempFile():
    os.remove(bookmarksFileCopy)

atexit.register(removeTempFile) # Delete the temp file when the script finishes

converted = subprocess.call(['plutil', '-convert', 'xml1', bookmarksFileCopy])

if converted != 0:
    print "Couldn't convert bookmarks plist from xml format"
    sys.exit(converted)

plist = plistlib.readPlist(bookmarksFileCopy)
 # There should only be one Reading List item, so take the first one
readingList = [item for item in plist['Children'] if 'Title' in item and item['Title'] == 'com.apple.ReadingList'][0]

if 'Children' in readingList:
    for item in readingList['Children']:
        print item['URLString']

Copy and paste that into a file, name it something like readinglisturls.py. Then make it executable by running chmod +x readinglisturls.py in the Terminal. Then you can run it in the Terminal and it will print out any Reading List URLs. If you want the URLs in a file, you can redirect the output to a file by running /path/to/readinglisturls.py > myfile.txt in the Terminal.