How to programmatically get available wifi networks without airport utility?

Question

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?

Answer 1

You could (mis)use awk to filter the result:

airport -s -x| awk '          { if (catch == 1) { print; catch=0 } }
                   /SSID_STR/ { catch=1 }'
<string>UPC Wi-Free</string>
<string>UPCE191589</string>
<string>The Cloud</string>
<string>UPCE191589</string>
<string>The Cloud</string>

Not very nice, but does the job :-)

OTOH, a SSID can be anything, it doesn't even need to be printable (see Is there a standard that defines what is a valid SSID and password?). So any attempt to handle SSID in text-based utilities will likely fail sooner or later.