Is there a way other than using the airport
command line utility to get the list of available wifi networks programmatically (for consumption by an application)? Here is the context:
I have a command line application for managing wifi networks (https://github.com/keithrbennett/wifiwand, gem install wifi-wand
) in which I get the list of available wifi networks using airport -s
.
Unfortunately, because the network names are presented right aligned, there is no way to determine whether or not, or how many, leading spaces the name contains. There is a -x option to output the data in XML format, but in Ruby, parsing XML usually requires installing the nokogiri
gem, which is legendarily problematic, and I don't want to impose that on my users. So I go through this weird and less than 100% reliable process to return the correct results in most but not all cases.
What are my other options, if any, for getting this information?