XML to JSON Converter Online

Why Convert XML to JSON

XML dominated data interchange for over two decades. Enterprise SOAP APIs, RSS and Atom feeds, Maven and Spring configuration files, SVG graphics, and countless government or financial data formats all rely on XML. That legacy is not disappearing overnight, but the tools and frameworks developers reach for today overwhelmingly expect JSON. REST APIs return JSON by default, JavaScript's JSON.parse() is a single function call, and front-end state libraries like Redux or Zustand serialize state as plain objects.

Converting XML to JSON bridges that gap. Common scenarios include:

• Migrating legacy SOAP services to modern REST or GraphQL endpoints without rewriting business logic all at once.
• Consuming RSS or Atom feeds in a React, Vue, or Svelte front end where JSON is the natural data shape.
• Porting configuration files from XML-based build systems (Ant, Maven) to JSON or YAML equivalents used by modern toolchains.
• Interoperating with third-party APIs that still return XML, such as certain payment gateways, shipping carriers, or government open-data portals.

This tool parses your XML entirely in the browser and produces clean JSON instantly, with no data ever leaving your machine.

XML Concepts That Don't Map Cleanly to JSON

XML and JSON have fundamentally different data models. JSON is built on two structures: ordered arrays and unordered key-value objects. XML, by contrast, is a tree of named elements that can carry attributes, mixed content, namespaces, processing instructions, and CDATA sections. Several of these concepts have no direct JSON equivalent:

• Attributes vs. elements. In XML, <book id="42"> carries metadata on the element itself. JSON objects have no separate "attribute" concept; both attributes and child elements become keys.
• Mixed content. An XML element can contain both text and child elements interleaved: <p>Hello <b>world</b></p>. Representing this in JSON requires splitting the text into separate nodes, which most converters approximate rather than perfectly capture.
• Namespaces. XML namespaces like xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" disambiguate element names from different vocabularies. JSON has no built-in namespace mechanism, so converters typically prefix key names or strip namespaces entirely.
• CDATA sections. CDATA blocks let XML include raw text without escaping angle brackets or ampersands. In JSON the content simply becomes a string value, and the distinction between CDATA and regular text disappears.
• Document order. XML guarantees element order; JSON objects do not. While most modern JavaScript engines preserve insertion order, the JSON specification does not require it.

Understanding these differences helps you anticipate where a round-trip conversion (XML to JSON and back) may not produce byte-identical XML, and where you may need to adjust the output for your use case.

Convention Choices in the Conversion

Because no lossless one-to-one mapping exists between XML and JSON, every converter must make convention choices. This tool follows the widely adopted conventions that minimize surprise for most developers:

• Attributes become @attr keys. Given <item type="book">, the JSON output includes { "@type": "book" }. The @ prefix makes it easy to distinguish attributes from child elements at a glance.
• Text nodes become #text. When an element contains both attributes (or children) and a text value, the text is stored under a #text key. For leaf elements with no attributes, the value is a simple string instead.
• Repeated elements become arrays. If a parent contains multiple children with the same tag name, they are automatically grouped into a JSON array. A single child remains an object. This heuristic handles the vast majority of real-world XML, though it means the JSON shape can differ depending on whether one or many siblings exist.
• Numeric and boolean coercion. Values that look like numbers or booleans (true, 42, 3.14) are converted to their native JSON types rather than left as strings, giving you cleaner data to work with downstream.

These conventions are consistent with popular libraries like fast-xml-parser (which powers this tool) and the Newtonsoft XML-to-JSON serializer in .NET, so the output will feel familiar if you have used either before.

Related Tools

Depending on your workflow, you may also find these tools useful:

• JSON to XML — the reverse direction. Useful when you need to send data back to a system that expects XML, or to verify round-trip fidelity.
• XML Formatter — pretty-print and indent raw XML before converting, making it easier to inspect the source document and understand its structure.
• JSON Formatter — validate and format the JSON output with customizable indentation, or minify it for production use.

All tools on CodeBoxTools process data entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, so you can safely convert configuration files, API responses, or any other data without privacy concerns.