Howto retrieve text from crashed stickies on OSX

Documentation on Apple's OSX Stickies is rather thin on the ground. So when they crashed and displayed no text, I thought I'd lost them. I recovered backups, and although the file widget-com.apple.widget.stickies.plist had plenty of data in in, I was unable to find how to restore directly.


You can open the .plist of course, its just xml, but its very messy, looking like


<key>4cfdd4078b5daa41-font</key>
<string>MarkerFelt-Thin</string>
<key>4cfdd4078b5daa41-size</key>
<string>Auto</string>
<key>7ba0bd063c25b541-color</key>
<string>Images/yellow.png</string>
<key>7ba0bd063c25b541-data</key>
<string>http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/weeklyrain.shtml&lt;div&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</string>

and so hard to navigate.


To at least recover the contents, I used a Plist Editor, in my case PlistEdit Pro, and this makes the text appear on a single line, so then you only need to remove some HTML codes:

I copied out each line, pasted into a text editor, and then I'm done.