XML to JSON Converter with Attribute Options

How the XML to JSON converter maps elements, attributes and text

XML and JSON do not line up one to one — XML has attributes, mixed text and repeated elements, JSON has objects, arrays and plain values — so every XML to JSON converter has to pick conventions. This one uses the widely understood ones and lets you change them:

Each element becomes a key named after the tag. An element that contains only text becomes a plain string, so <title>Dune</title> turns into "title": "Dune". An empty element becomes an empty string. Attributes become keys with a prefix, "@" by default, so <book id="7"> produces "@id": "7". When an element has attributes or child elements and also text, the text goes under a text key, "#text" by default. Sibling elements with the same name are collected into an array, so two <book> elements become "book": [ {...}, {...} ]. Comments and processing instructions are dropped, and CDATA sections are treated as text.

All values come out as strings. XML has no types without a schema, so 007 stays "007" rather than being guessed into the number 7; cast the fields you know are numeric in your own code. Note too that mixed content loses its ordering: in <p>Hello <b>world</b> again</p> the text pieces are joined under #text and the <b> element becomes a separate key, so this converter suits data-style XML better than document-style markup.

Options: attribute prefix, text key, arrays, whitespace and namespaces

Attribute prefix and text key can be set to whatever your code expects — "_" and "__text", "$" and "_", or an empty attribute prefix if you prefer attributes to look like ordinary keys (watch for clashes with child elements of the same name).

The always-array toggle solves the classic XML to JSON headache: an element that appears once becomes an object, but the same element appearing twice becomes an array, so code that loops over it breaks on the single-item case. With always-array on, every child element is wrapped in an array, which makes the shape predictable at the cost of extra [0] lookups.

Ignore whitespace (on by default) drops the indentation between elements and trims text; switch it off when leading or trailing spaces inside text are meaningful. Keep namespaces leaves prefixed names such as soap:Envelope and the xmlns declarations in place; switch it off to strip prefixes and xmlns attributes for cleaner keys, as long as no two namespaces use the same local name in one element.

Convert XML to JSON online, privately

The XML is parsed with your browser's built-in DOMParser, the same strict XML parser the browser uses for SVG and RSS. Nothing is uploaded, so it is safe for API responses, config files and exports containing customer data. Because the parser is strict, malformed input fails with the line and column of the problem — an unclosed tag, a stray ampersand that should be &amp;, or two root elements — rather than producing half-converted output. HTML is not XML: unclosed <br> or <img> tags will fail, so use an HTML-specific tool for web pages.

The result is pretty-printed with two-space indentation. Copy it or download it as a .json file. To go the other way, the JSON to XML converter uses the same @ and #text conventions, so data converted here can be turned back into equivalent XML.