TOON to XML Converter

Example: TOON input and real XML output

The output below was generated by the same conversion code the converter uses, run on this sample when the page was built.

directory:
  employees[4]{id,name,dept,salary,remote}:
    1,Alice Chen,Engineering,128000,true
    2,Bob Okafor,Sales,86000,false
    3,Carla Diaz,Engineering,119000,true
    4,Dan Weiss,Support,64000,false

<directory>
  <employees>
    <id>1</id>
    <name>Alice Chen</name>
    <dept>Engineering</dept>
    <salary>128000</salary>
    <remote>true</remote>
  </employees>
  <employees>
    <id>2</id>
    <name>Bob Okafor</name>
    <dept>Sales</dept>
    <salary>86000</salary>
    <remote>false</remote>
  </employees>
  <employees>
    <id>3</id>
    <name>Carla Diaz</name>
    <dept>Engineering</dept>
    <salary>119000</salary>
    <remote>true</remote>
  </employees>
  <employees>
    <id>4</id>
    <name>Dan Weiss</name>
    <dept>Support</dept>
    <salary>64000</salary>
    <remote>false</remote>
  </employees>
</directory>

XML output is 206% larger than the TOON input. The same data is 338 characters as minified JSON and 613 as pretty-printed JSON. Sizes are character counts, not tokens: token counts depend on the model's tokenizer (see the tokenizer comparison). Across larger datasets, TOON averages about 43% fewer tokens than JSON (42.6%) according to the official TOON benchmark.

TOON to XML: what changes

• Reading TOON: TOON is strict about structure: the [N] in an array header must match the number of rows, and each row needs exactly as many values as the {field} list. Hand-edited TOON that breaks either rule fails to decode.
• Writing XML: XML needs exactly one root element. Several top-level keys, or a top-level key holding an array, produce sibling roots that are not well-formed XML, which is why this sample is wrapped in a single key. Keys prefixed with @_ become attributes.

Why Convert TOON to XML?

Use XML when working with legacy systems, SOAP APIs, or when you need rich metadata and validation schemas.