JSON to XML Converter

Modern APIs speak JSON. A lot of the systems they eventually have to talk to — an enterprise SOAP service, a legacy import job, an old EDI pipeline — still only accept XML. This converter bridges that gap, but it is worth understanding upfront that the two formats do not map onto each other perfectly.

The honest limitation: this conversion is lossy

JSON and XML were built around different ideas of what data looks like, and translating between them means making choices, not just reformatting. XML has attributes as well as elements, and a converter has to decide where a JSON key becomes an element and where it becomes an attribute — there is no single correct answer, only a convention.

JSON, on the other hand, has native arrays and real types: numbers, booleans, and null are distinct from strings. XML has none of that built in — every value is text until something outside the XML itself, such as a schema, says otherwise. Converting JSON to XML means every 42 and every true becomes plain text, indistinguishable from the string "42" or "true" unless you attach a schema to say what it should be.

Choices a JSON-to-XML conversion has to make

• Repeated array items — usually become sibling elements with the same tag name, since XML has no native array construct to mark a list explicitly.
• Object keys — become child elements by default; some converters offer an option to turn certain keys into attributes instead, closer to typical hand-written XML.
• A JSON key starting with a number or containing a space — is not a legal XML element name, so it has to be sanitised or renamed.
• Null values — commonly become an empty element or a self-closing tag, since XML has no direct equivalent of JSON’s null.
• The root element — JSON has no single top-level wrapper requirement; XML insists on exactly one root, so the converter has to invent one, often called something generic like root.

A small example

JSON to XML questions