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XML to JSON Converter
Turn XML documents into JSON your JavaScript can actually use.
An RSS feed, an old SOAP response, a configuration file from a legacy system — all XML, and none of it something a JavaScript frontend wants to parse directly. Converting to JSON hands you an object you can work with using ordinary dot notation instead of an XML DOM API.
The ambiguity this conversion has to resolve
XML makes a distinction JSON does not need to: an attribute versus a child element. <book id="7"><title>Dune</title></book> has an attribute and an element that both look like properties of the book once you are thinking in JSON terms. Most converters keep them distinguishable by prefixing attribute names, commonly with something like @id, so the information is not silently merged and lost.
A second, thornier problem: XML has no array type, so a converter cannot tell purely from the schema whether a tag was meant to repeat. A document with one <item> and a document with three both use the same tag. Handling this well means either always producing an array for that tag, even when there is only one item, or inspecting the actual document and guessing — and guessing is where subtle bugs creep in when a feed unexpectedly drops from two items to one.
Converting an XML document to JSON
- Paste or upload the XML file.
- Convert it to JSON.
- Check any element that could plausibly repeat — confirm it came through as an array, not a bare object, even where the source had only one instance.
- Check attributes came through under a distinct key rather than being merged with child element values.
- Use the JSON in your application, keeping the source XML as the reference if anything looks off.
What XML has that JSON simply cannot represent
- Namespaces, such as
xmlns:atom="...", which qualify what an element name actually means and have no clean JSON equivalent. - Comments, which are legal anywhere in an XML document and are typically dropped entirely during conversion.
- Mixed content, where an element contains both text and child elements at once, such as
<p>Hello <b>world</b></p>. - Processing instructions and CDATA sections, which are XML-specific mechanisms with no direct JSON counterpart.
- Document order guarantees in some edge cases, once sibling elements of different tag names get grouped into different JSON keys.
XML to JSON questions
Why does a single-item list sometimes come back as an object, not an array?
Because the converter only saw one occurrence of that tag in this particular document and cannot know it was meant to be a list. This is one of the most common bugs in XML-to-JSON pipelines, and forcing certain tags to always be arrays is the usual fix.
What happens to XML attributes?
They are typically preserved under a distinguishable key, often with an @ prefix, so id="7" does not overwrite or merge with a child element that happens to be named id.
Are XML comments included in the JSON?
No, comments are almost universally discarded during conversion, since JSON has no comment syntax and no equivalent structural place to put them.
Can this handle a large XML feed, like a sitemap or RSS file?
Yes, for typical feed sizes. Very large XML documents, in the tens of megabytes, are mainly limited by your browser’s available memory rather than anything about the conversion itself.
Is the XML uploaded to a server?
Yes. The XML is sent to the server to be parsed and converted, but it is not stored or retained after processing.
