Xml to Json

Paste XML or open an .xml file and get clean JSON instantly. Choose how attributes and text are named, whether repeated elements always become arrays, and whether numbers and booleans are converted. The conversion happens entirely in your browser.

How XML maps to JSON

XML and JSON describe data differently, so every converter has to make choices. XML has elements, attributes, text content, namespaces and the order of repeated elements; JSON has objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and null. This converter follows the widely used convention in which each element becomes a key, attributes become keys with a prefix, and text inside an element with attributes becomes a “#text” key.

You can change the attribute prefix — some systems expect an underscore or no prefix at all — and the name of the text key.

Arrays: the most common surprise

In XML, a list is just repeated elements, so a single child and a list with one item look identical. By default the converter produces an array only when an element actually repeats. That keeps simple documents tidy, but it means code reading the JSON must handle both a single object and an array. If you are converting many files with the same schema, choose “Always use arrays”: every element becomes an array, which is more verbose but consistent from file to file.

Numbers, booleans and strings

XML text has no types — “44.95”, “true” and “00123” are all just characters. Keeping everything as strings is the safest choice because nothing is lost: leading zeros in ZIP codes or product IDs survive, and very long numbers are not rounded. Choose “Convert numbers & booleans” when you know the data is numeric and want JSON ready for calculations or charting. Only plain decimal numbers are converted; values with leading zeros such as “007” stay as text.

Namespaces

Documents such as RSS/Atom feeds, SOAP messages, SVG and Office files use namespace prefixes like dc:creator or soap:Body. Keeping the prefixes preserves the exact names; stripping them produces shorter keys but can merge two different elements that share a local name, so strip only when you know the document well. Namespace declarations such as xmlns:dc appear as ordinary attributes with the chosen prefix.

Worked example

The sample catalogue above contains two book elements. Each has an id and an available attribute and a price with a currency attribute. With the default options the output is an object whose single key catalog holds a book array of two objects. Switching values to “Convert numbers & booleans” turns "@available": "true" into true and the price text into the number 44.95.

What is not preserved

• Comments and processing instructions such as <?xml-stylesheet?> are dropped.
• Mixed content — text interleaved with child elements, as in <p>Hello <b>world</b>!</p> — keeps the text joined in one “#text” value, so the exact order is lost. For document-style XML such as XHTML or DocBook, a specialised transformation is a better fit.
• Whitespace-only text used for indentation is ignored.
• CDATA sections are included as text.
• DTD entity definitions beyond the standard XML entities are not expanded.

Checking the JSON you get

After converting, spot-check a few records against the original XML: pick an element that appears once and one that repeats, and confirm both are shaped as your code expects. If the JSON will be loaded into a typed language or a database with a fixed schema, the “Always use arrays” and “Keep as strings” options give the most predictable structure, because a field never switches between an object and an array or between a number and a string from one file to the next. When you rename the attribute prefix or text key, make sure the new names cannot collide with real element names in your documents — a document that already has an element called text should not use “text” as the text key.

Privacy and file size

The conversion uses your browser's built-in XML parser; no file is uploaded. Files of several megabytes convert in a moment on a modern computer. Very large files (tens of megabytes) may be slow because the whole document is loaded into memory — for those, a command-line tool or streaming parser is more suitable.

Common uses

Developers use XML-to-JSON conversion to feed legacy SOAP or XML API responses into JavaScript applications, to inspect RSS feeds, to migrate configuration files, and to load data exports from older business systems into document databases or spreadsheets. Copy the output straight into your code, or download it as a .json file.