XML to JSON
Convert XML document payloads to clean, structured JSON format with real-time tuning parameters for attribute mapping, namespace stripping, type-casting, text keys, and root-tag wrapping.
Convert XML document payloads to clean, structured JSON format with real-time tuning parameters for attribute mapping, namespace stripping, type-casting, text keys, and root-tag wrapping.
This tool is designed to provide a seamless experience for developers by handling complex operations directly in your browser with maximum speed and security.
An XML to JSON converter reads an XML document and produces a JSON representation of the same data. On the surface this sounds like a straightforward structural transformation — XML elements become JSON keys, element text content becomes JSON values. In practice the conversion involves a series of structural decisions that have no single correct answer, and getting them wrong produces JSON that is technically valid but awkward or broken to use in application code.
The first decision is what to do with XML attributes. XML elements can have both attributes and child elements simultaneously — something JSON objects cannot represent without a convention. The most common convention is to map attributes to keys prefixed with @ and map text content to a key named #text. So becomes {"user": {"@id": "1", "#text": "Priya Singh"}}. This convention is used by most XML-to-JSON libraries including Python's xmltodict and Node's xml2js. Understanding this convention is important because code that consumes the converted JSON needs to look for "@id" and "#text" keys, not "id" and the element text directly.
The second decision is what to do with repeated sibling elements — multiple elements with the same tag name at the same level. XML natively supports this; JSON does not have a concept of repeated keys in an object. The correct representation is a JSON array. If an XML parent has three child elements, the JSON equivalent is {"role": ["Admin", "Dev", "Viewer"]}. But if the parent has only one child, a naive converter produces {"role": "Admin"} — a string, not an array. Code that expects an array and receives a string throws at runtime. A robust converter always produces an array for elements that could have multiple occurrences, even when only one is present in the sample. This tool applies that rule consistently.
The third decision is CDATA sections. CDATA (Character Data) is an XML mechanism for embedding text that should not be parsed as XML markup — HTML fragments, code samples, or text containing angle brackets. CDATA content should be included as the text value of the corresponding JSON key, with the CDATA wrapper stripped. A converter that includes the literal CDATA markers in the output produces unusable values.
Namespace-prefixed elements — tags like soap:Body, xs:element, or rdf:Description — are a fourth complication. Namespaces qualify element names to avoid collisions in documents that mix XML vocabularies. The namespace prefix appears in the JSON key as-is unless the converter is configured to strip it, which makes keys like "soap:Body" valid JSON but technically requires quoting in some JSON parsers. This tool preserves namespace prefixes by default, which is the safest behaviour for round-trip fidelity.
This tool parses an XML document and produces a JSON object that represents the same data structure, following conversion conventions that produce output usable by standard JSON parsing libraries in JavaScript, Python, Java, and other languages. The root XML element becomes the top-level key in the JSON output. Every child element becomes a nested key under its parent. Element text content — the value between an opening and closing tag — becomes the string value for that key when the element has no attributes and no child elements. This is the simplest case and the one most XML documents follow for leaf-level data fields. XML attributes are mapped to keys prefixed with @ at the same level as sibling child elements. An element like becomes a JSON object containing both the @id attribute key and any child element keys. This convention is explicit, reversible, and consistent with the behaviour of widely used XML parsing libraries. If you are processing the output in JavaScript, Python's xmltodict, or Node's xml2js, the @ prefix convention will be familiar. Repeated sibling elements — multiple child elements with the same tag name — are converted to a JSON array. A parent element containing three child elements becomes a JSON object with a "role" key whose value is an array of three strings. Critically, this tool also produces an array when only one such child element is present, to ensure your consuming code can always treat the value as an array without type-checking. This one-element array behaviour prevents the most common class of runtime errors in XML-to-JSON pipeline code. CDATA sections are unwrapped. The text content inside a CDATA block is extracted and used as the string value of the corresponding key. The CDATA markers themselves are stripped from the output. This means HTML fragments, code samples, or any text that was wrapped in CDATA to avoid XML parsing is correctly preserved as a plain string in the JSON. Namespace-prefixed tags are preserved with their prefix in the JSON key name — soap:Body becomes "soap:Body" in the JSON output. This maintains round-trip fidelity and avoids silent data loss when converting namespace-heavy XML from SOAP services, RSS feeds, or XML Schema documents. The output is pretty-printed by default with consistent two-space indentation, and a minify toggle produces compact JSON when size matters.
1. Paste your XML into the input panel. The XML can be a complete document with a declaration header () or a fragment starting directly with the root element — both are accepted. If you have an XML file, open it in a text editor, select all, and paste the content.
2. Click Generate JSON Data. The conversion is instant. The output panel shows the JSON representation of your XML, pretty-printed with consistent indentation.
3. Review the top-level structure. Your root XML element becomes the top-level key in the JSON. If you only need the data inside the root element, unwrap it by copying the value of that top-level key rather than the entire JSON object.
4. Check how attributes were mapped. XML attributes appear as @-prefixed keys in the JSON output. If an element had both attributes and child elements, you will see both @attributeName keys and regular child element keys in the same JSON object. If your consuming code does not expect @ prefixes, you may need to remap these keys after conversion.
5. Check repeated sibling elements. Elements with the same tag name at the same parent level are represented as JSON arrays. Verify that array fields in your output are correct and that your application code handles them as arrays rather than scalars.
6. Check CDATA content. If your XML contained CDATA sections, their content appears as plain string values in the JSON. Verify that the content is correctly extracted and that no CDATA markup characters appear in the string values.
7. Copy the JSON output using the Copy button, or toggle Minify for compact output. Paste into your application code, test suite, configuration file, or wherever the JSON needs to land.
XML was the dominant data interchange format for the better part of two decades. SOAP web services, RSS and Atom feeds, configuration files, enterprise system exports, government data portals, financial data feeds — all of them use XML. The world has largely moved to JSON for new APIs and new systems, but the existing XML-based infrastructure has not disappeared. It will not disappear. Any developer who works with legacy systems, third-party enterprise integrations, financial data, or public sector data will encounter XML regularly. The problem is that modern tooling is built around JSON. JavaScript JSON.parse() is a native language feature. Python's json module is part of the standard library. Every modern REST API client, every frontend framework, every mobile SDK expects JSON. When you receive XML from an upstream system and need to feed it into a JSON-native pipeline, you need to convert it first. Writing an XML-to-JSON converter is one of those tasks that looks simple until you get to the edge cases. ElementTree in Python will parse your XML, but extracting a structured dict from it requires you to write recursive traversal code that handles attributes, mixed content, and repeated elements correctly. I have written that code, and it is never as simple as it looks. The repeated sibling element problem alone — where your parser produces a string when one element is present and an array when two are present, breaking downstream code that expects a consistent type — is a bug I have seen in production XML processing pipelines more than once. The fix is not complicated, but you have to know to look for it and to handle it explicitly. For developers integrating with SOAP services — still common in banking, insurance, healthcare, and government systems — converting the response envelope to JSON before working with it is often the most practical approach. SOAP responses are verbose XML with namespace-heavy wrapper elements. Stripping the envelope and converting the payload to JSON is faster than writing XPath queries for every field you need. RSS and Atom feed processing has the same pattern. Feed readers, content aggregators, and monitoring tools often need to normalise RSS XML into JSON objects that can be stored, filtered, and forwarded through a JSON-native pipeline. Converting the feed XML to JSON once at ingestion is cleaner than maintaining XML parsing code throughout the pipeline. The browser-based, no-install design matters for operational use cases too. When you are debugging an integration at 2am and need to inspect what an XML API response actually looks like as a JSON structure, you want to paste and convert — not run a Python script, not install a package, not spin up a container. The tool is available wherever you have a browser.
XML attributes mapped to @-prefixed keys — consistent with xmltodict & xml2js and other standard XML parsing library conventions
Repeated sibling elements always produce JSON arrays — even single-occurrence elements output as arrays for consistent downstream type handling
CDATA sections unwrapped — text content extracted cleanly with no markup characters in the output
Empty elements output as null — correct JSON representation of self-closing or empty XML tags
Namespace-prefixed tags preserved in JSON key names for round-trip fidelity
Pretty-printed output by default with minify toggle for compact JSON
Handles well-formed XML fragments as well as complete documents with XML declaration headers
Runs entirely in your browser — zero data transmitted & no install & no account required
Converting SOAP API response payloads into JSON for processing in a modern REST-native backend service
Transforming RSS or Atom feed XML into JSON for ingestion into a content aggregation or monitoring pipeline
Converting legacy enterprise system XML exports into JSON for import into a modern database or API
Normalising XML configuration files from third-party tools into JSON for processing in a JSON-native configuration system
Debugging and inspecting XML API responses by viewing them as more readable JSON structure
Converting XML data from a government or financial data portal into JSON for analysis in JavaScript or Python
Transforming WSDL or XML Schema documents into JSON for tooling that works with JSON Schema
Processing XML webhook payloads from enterprise systems into JSON before storing in a document database
Example Input
<root>
<user id="1" active="true">
<name>Priya Singh</name>
<email>priya@techcorp.io</email>
<role>Principal Engineer</role>
<role>Team Lead</role>
<profile>
<bio><![CDATA[15 years in distributed systems & data infrastructure.]]></bio>
<timezone>Asia/Kolkata</timezone>
<githubhandle>priyasingh-eng</githubhandle>
</profile>
<reportsto>
</reportsto></user>
</root>Example Output
{
"root": {
"user": {
"@id": "1",
"@active": "true",
"name": "Priya Singh",
"email": "priya@techcorp.io",
"role": ["Principal Engineer", "Team Lead"],
"profile": {
"bio": "15 years in distributed systems & data infrastructure.",
"timezone": "Asia/Kolkata",
"githubHandle": "priyasingh-eng"
},
"reportsTo": null
}
}
}Parse error: mismatched tag or unexpected end of input
Fix: Your XML is not well-formed. XML requires every opening tag to have a matching closing tag, and every self-closing element to use the /> syntax. Common causes: a missing closing tag like , an unclosed attribute quote, or an unescaped special character in text content (& must be &, < must be <, > must be >). Paste your XML into an XML validator first to identify the specific well-formedness violation before attempting conversion.
Output JSON has @-prefixed keys like @id or @type that my code does not expect
Fix: XML attributes are mapped to @-prefixed keys by convention, following the xmltodict and xml2js libraries. This is intentional — it distinguishes attributes from child elements at the same level. If your consuming code needs clean key names without @ prefixes, post-process the JSON after conversion: in JavaScript, recursively replace Object.keys that start with @ with the key name minus the prefix. Alternatively, restructure your XML to use child elements instead of attributes for the data you need, which maps more cleanly to JSON.
A field I expected to be a string is an array — or a field I expected to be an array is a string
Fix: Repeated sibling elements in XML produce a JSON array; a single element produces a string (or object, depending on its content). This inconsistency in type between one-occurrence and multiple-occurrence cases is the most common source of runtime errors in XML-to-JSON conversion pipelines. This tool produces arrays even for single-occurrence elements when array output is enabled. If you are seeing this issue, check whether you need to enable the force-array option, or write defensive code that normalises the value: value = Array.isArray(v) ? v : [v] in JavaScript.
CDATA content appears in the JSON with literal CDATA markup characters
Fix: Your XML contains a CDATA section whose content was not correctly unwrapped during conversion. The CDATA markers themselves — — should be stripped and only the inner text content should appear in the JSON. If you see these markers in your output, the XML parser did not handle the CDATA section correctly. Try reformatting your CDATA content as escaped XML text instead (replacing & with &, < with <) and converting again.
Namespace-prefixed keys like soap:Body or xs:element causing issues in JSON consumers
Fix: XML namespace prefixes like soap:, xs:, and rdf: appear in JSON key names as-is, producing keys like 'soap:Body'. These are valid JSON strings but require quoted bracket access in JavaScript (obj['soap:Body']) and cannot be accessed with dot notation (obj.soap:Body is a syntax error). If your downstream code uses dot notation for key access, post-process the JSON to replace namespace prefixes with underscores or remove them entirely after conversion. Alternatively, work with the bracket notation or use a JSON path library that handles special characters in key names.
Writing application code that accesses a repeated element field as a scalar string instead of an array — when XML has multiple sibling elements with the same tag, the JSON output is an array. If your code does result['roles']['role'] expecting a string and the value is an array, you get an array object where you expected a string, and any string operation on it fails or produces wrong results. Always treat repeated-element fields as arrays. When in doubt, check with Array.isArray() in JavaScript or isinstance(value, list) in Python before accessing elements.
Not accounting for the @ prefix on attribute keys when accessing the JSON — XML attributes appear in the JSON as keys like @id, @active, @type. If you try to access result.user.id expecting the XML id attribute, you will get undefined or a KeyError because the key is @id, not id. Either access it with the @ prefix directly (result.user['@id'] in JavaScript, result['user']['@id'] in Python), or post-process the JSON to strip @ prefixes from attribute keys after conversion if your consuming code needs clean key names.
Assuming all attribute values are typed correctly — XML attributes are always strings in the XML data model. The attribute active='true' becomes '@active': 'true' in the JSON, not '@active': true (a boolean). If your code checks if (user['@active'] === true) it will fail because the value is the string 'true', not the boolean true. You need to explicitly coerce attribute values to their intended types after conversion.
Feeding malformed XML to the converter — XML is strict about well-formedness. Every opening tag must have a matching closing tag (or be self-closing), attributes must be quoted, and special characters in text content must be escaped as XML entities (& for &, < for <, > for >). A single missing closing tag or unescaped ampersand in a text value will cause the XML parser to throw a parse error before any conversion can occur. Validate your XML in an XML validator first if you are getting parser errors.
Expecting the conversion to be perfectly reversible — XML and JSON have different expressive capabilities. XML can represent mixed content (elements that contain both text and child elements interspersed), processing instructions, and comments. These have no direct JSON equivalent and are either dropped or approximated during conversion. A JSON-to-XML conversion of the output will not necessarily reproduce the original XML exactly. If you need lossless round-trip conversion, use a format like YAML or MessagePack that is more structurally equivalent to JSON.
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How are XML attributes handled in the JSON output?
XML attributes are mapped to keys prefixed with @ at the same level as the element's child element keys. An element like produces a JSON object with '@id': '1' and '@active': 'true' as keys, alongside any child element keys. This convention follows the behaviour of widely used XML parsing libraries including Python's xmltodict (pip install xmltodict) and Node.js's xml2js — so if you are processing the output in either language, the @ convention will be immediately familiar. All attribute values are strings in the JSON output, regardless of their apparent type in the XML.
Does it support XML namespaces?
Yes, with namespace prefixes preserved in the JSON key names. An element like becomes the key 'soap:Body' in the JSON output. This preserves the full element identity from the original XML and maintains round-trip fidelity. The trade-off is that keys with namespace prefixes contain a colon character, which requires bracket notation for access in JavaScript (obj['soap:Body']) and standard dict access in Python (obj['soap:Body']). If you need prefix-free key names, post-process the output to strip or replace the prefix — but be aware that this loses the namespace context and may cause key collisions if two elements share a local name under different namespaces.
How are repeated sibling elements converted?
Multiple child elements with the same tag name at the same parent level are converted to a JSON array. A parent element containing three child elements produces a JSON object with a 'role' key whose value is an array of three elements. This tool also produces a single-element array when only one such element is present — ['Admin'] rather than 'Admin'. This consistent array output is important for application code correctness: code that iterates over roles with forEach or a Python for loop works correctly whether there is one role or ten, without needing a type check before the loop.
How does it handle CDATA sections?
CDATA (Character Data) sections in XML are blocks of text that should not be parsed as XML markup — they are used to embed HTML fragments, code, or text containing characters like < and & that would otherwise need to be escaped. During conversion, the CDATA wrapper is stripped and the text content inside it is used as the plain string value of the corresponding JSON key. The output is clean text without any CDATA markers. The & character inside a CDATA section is preserved as a literal & in the JSON string value, not converted to an HTML entity.
What happens to empty XML elements?
Self-closing elements like and empty elements like are converted to null in the JSON output. This is the correct JSON representation of an explicitly present but empty value — it distinguishes a key that exists with no value from a key that is absent entirely. If your application logic needs to distinguish between null (element present, empty) and missing key (element absent), null is the correct representation and your code can check for it explicitly.
Can I convert the JSON back to XML?
The conversion is not perfectly reversible because XML and JSON have different expressive capabilities. XML can represent mixed content (a single element containing both text and child elements interspersed), processing instructions (), and comments (). These have no direct JSON equivalent and are dropped during XML-to-JSON conversion. For simple XML documents with no mixed content or processing instructions, a JSON-to-XML round-trip will reproduce the original structure correctly. For complex documents, some structural information will be lost. If you need lossless round-trip conversion, keep the original XML as the source of truth and regenerate it from the XML rather than converting JSON back.
What XML formats does it support?
The tool supports any well-formed XML document or fragment. This includes plain XML data files, SOAP response envelopes, RSS and Atom feeds, Android resource files, Maven pom.xml files, SVG (which is XML), XHTML, and any other format that follows the XML well-formedness rules. The XML declaration header () is optional — the tool accepts documents with or without it. Malformed XML — missing closing tags, unquoted attributes, unescaped special characters in text content — will cause a parse error before conversion can proceed.
Is my XML data sent to any server?
No. The entire conversion runs in JavaScript in your browser. Your XML is never transmitted to any external server, never logged, and never stored anywhere outside your local browser tab. You can verify this by opening your browser's network inspector before pasting any XML and confirming there are zero outbound requests carrying your data. This makes the tool safe for SOAP responses containing authentication tokens, enterprise system exports with sensitive records, or any XML document you would not upload to a third-party service.
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