XML to JSON Converter

Example: XML input and real JSON output

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

<catalog>
  <book id="bk101">
    <title>Designing Data-Intensive Applications</title>
    <author>Martin Kleppmann</author>
    <year>2017</year>
  </book>
  <book id="bk102">
    <title>The Pragmatic Programmer</title>
    <author>Andrew Hunt</author>
    <year>1999</year>
  </book>
</catalog>

{
  "catalog": {
    "book": [
      {
        "title": "Designing Data-Intensive Applications",
        "author": "Martin Kleppmann",
        "year": 2017,
        "@_id": "bk101"
      },
      {
        "title": "The Pragmatic Programmer",
        "author": "Andrew Hunt",
        "year": 1999,
        "@_id": "bk102"
      }
    ]
  }
}

JSON output is 15% larger than the XML input. The same data is 214 characters as minified JSON and 341 as pretty-printed JSON. Sizes are character counts, not tokens: token counts depend on the model's tokenizer (see the tokenizer comparison).

XML to JSON: what changes

• The id attribute shows up as "@_id", and the two <book> elements become an array. If a document has only one <book>, the same path becomes an object instead, so code reading the JSON should handle both shapes.
• Reading XML: Attributes are kept with an @_ prefix (id="bk101" becomes "@_id"), repeated child elements become arrays, and numeric text becomes numbers. A single child element becomes an object, not a one-item array, so the shape depends on how many elements appear.
• Writing JSON: Output is pretty-printed with your chosen indentation. JSON is the safest target when the data goes into code, an API, or another tool.

Why Convert XML to JSON?

Use JSON when you need maximum compatibility with other systems, APIs, or programming languages. It's the de facto standard for web APIs and data exchange.