XML to JSON Converter Guide: Transform XML Data to JSON (2026)

1. XML Attributes Have No JSON Equivalent

XML elements can have attributes: <user id="1" name="Rahul"/>. JSON has no attribute concept. Solutions:

2. Array Detection Is Ambiguous

<!-- Two items = array -->
<items><item>A</item><item>B</item></items>
→ {"items": {"item": ["A", "B"]}}

<!-- One item = string (not array!) -->
<items><item>A</item></items>
→ {"items": {"item": "A"}}

This inconsistency breaks code that expects arrays. Solutions: always force arrays for known repeated elements, or use schema-aware converters.

3. Mixed Content

<p>Hello <b>world</b> today</p>

Text mixed with child elements has no clean JSON representation. Most converters lose the text positioning or use complex nested structures.

JavaScript (xml2js)

import { parseStringPromise } from 'xml2js';
const result = await parseStringPromise(xmlString, {
  explicitArray: false,  // Don't wrap single elements in array
  attrkey: '@',          // Prefix attributes with @
  charkey: '#text'       // Text content key
});
const json = JSON.stringify(result, null, 2);

Python (xmltodict)

import xmltodict, json
data = xmltodict.parse(xml_string)
json_string = json.dumps(data, indent=2)
# Attributes become @key: "@id": "1"

Command Line (xq)

# Install: pip install yq (includes xq)
xq . input.xml > output.json

XML namespaces (xmlns) have no JSON equivalent:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <soap:Body>
    <m:GetPrice xmlns:m="http://example.com">
      <m:Item>Apples</m:Item>
    </m:GetPrice>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Common Approaches

• Strip prefixes — "Envelope", "Body", "GetPrice" (most common, cleanest)
• Keep prefixes — "soap:Envelope", "m:GetPrice" (preserves info, messy keys)
• Map to nested objects — {"soap": {"Envelope": ...}} (complex but accurate)

For most use cases, stripping namespace prefixes produces the cleanest and most usable JSON.