Unable to open project... cannot be opened because the project file cannot be parsed

Question

I came across this problem and my senior told me about a solution i.e:

Right click on your projectname.xcodeproj file here projectname will be the name of your project. Now after right clicked select Show Packages Contents. After that open your projectname.pbxproj file in a text editor. Now search for the line containing <<<<<<< .mine, ======= and >>>>>>> .r. For example in my case it looked liked this

<<<<<<< .mine
    9ADAAC6A15DCEF6A0019ACA8 .... in Resources */,
=======
    52FD7F3D15DCEAEF009E9322 ... in Resources */,
>>>>>>> .r269

Now remove those <<<<<<< .mine, ======= and >>>>>>> .r lines so it would look like this

    9ADAAC6A15DCEF6A0019ACA8 /* BuyPriceBtn.png in Resources */,

    52FD7F3D15DCEAEF009E9322 /* discussionForm.zip in Resources */,

Now save and open your Xcode project and build it. Everything will be fine.

Muhammad's answer was very helpful (and helped lead to my fix). However, simply removing the >>>>>>> ======= <<<<<<< wasn't enough to fix the parse issue in the project.pbxproj (for me) when keeping changes from both branches after a merge.

I had a merge conflict in the PBXGroup section (whose beginning is indicated by a block comment like this: /* Begin PBXGroup section */) of the project.pbxproj file. However, the problem I encountered can occur in other places in the project.pbxproj file as well.

Below is a simplification of the merge conflict I encountered:

    <<<<<<< HEAD
          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
    =======
          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
    >>>>>>> branch name
            sourceTree = "<group>";
          };

When i removed the merge conflict markers this is what I was left with:

          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
            sourceTree = "<group>";
          };

Normally, removing the merge conflict markers would fix the parse issue in the project.pbxproj file and restore the workspace integrity. This time it didn't.

Below is what I did to solve the issue:

          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
            sourceTree = "<group>";
          };

          id = {
            isa = PBXGroup;
            children = (
                 id
            );
            name = "Your Group Name";
            sourceTree = "<group>";
          };

I actually had to add 2 lines at the end of the first PBXGroup.

You can see that if I would have chosen to discard the changes from either Head or the merging branch, there wouldn't have been a parse issue! However, in my case I wanted to keep both groups I added from each branch and simply removing the merge markers wasn't enough; I had to add extra lines to the project.pbxproj file in order to maintain correct formatting.

So, if you're running into parsing issues after you thought you'd resolved all you're merge conflicts, you might want to take a closer look at the .pbxproj and make sure there aren't any formatting problems!

I got this exact same error because Cordova will allow you to create a project with spaces in it, and Xcode doesn't know how to deal.

I had similar issue.

Below are steps to resolve it:

1. Navigate to folder where your projectName.xcodeproj.

   

2. Right click and select 'Show Package Contents'. You will be able to see list of files with .pbxproj extension.

   

3. Select project.pbxproj. Right click and open this file using 'Text Edit'.

   

4. You will be able to see <<<<<< .mine , ============ and >>>>>>>>>> .r123. These are generally conflicts that arise when you take update from SVN. Delete these and save file.

   

   

5. Now, you'll be able to open project without any error message.

Visual analysis of the Xcode project file did not help me to locate error after merging. After looking to syslog found such line when Xcode trying to parse the file:

2/7/14 12:39:12.792 PM Xcode[9949]: CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 4426. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.

After fixing that project can be opened ok.