XML to JSON Converter

About the XML to JSON converter

This tool turns an XML document into equivalent JSON. XML and JSON are the two most common data-interchange formats: XML grew out of document markup in the late 1990s and is still everywhere in SOAP web services, RSS feeds, Office documents, and enterprise configuration, while JSON is the lighter, JavaScript-native format that dominates modern REST and GraphQL APIs. Converting between them is a daily task when you are bridging an old XML feed to a JSON front end, debugging an API that speaks one format while your code expects the other, or just trying to read a dense XML payload more comfortably.

Everything runs locally using the browser's native DOMParser, so your XML never leaves the page. There is no upload, no server, and no logging, which makes it safe to paste configuration or payloads that contain private data. Paste your XML, click Convert, and copy the pretty-printed JSON.

How the conversion works

The converter parses the XML into a DOM tree, then walks that tree and builds a plain JavaScript object, which is serialised with JSON.stringify and two-space indentation. Three rules cover the structural mismatch between the formats:

element with attributes   -> "@attributes": { name: value, ... }
repeated child tag        -> array of objects
text-only element         -> string value

• Attributes move into an @attributes object so they stay separate from child elements, because JSON has no attribute concept.
• Repeated tags with the same name become a JSON array, preserving multiplicity that JSON keys alone cannot express.
• Leaf nodes with only text collapse to a string; mixed content (text plus child elements) keeps the text under a #text key.

Worked example

Take this small XML document with attributes and a repeated tag:

<root>
  <user id="1"><name>Alice</name></user>
  <user id="2"><name>Bob</name></user>
</root>

Because user appears twice, it becomes an array, and each id attribute lands under @attributes:

{
  "root": {
    "user": [
      { "@attributes": { "id": "1" }, "name": "Alice" },
      { "@attributes": { "id": "2" }, "name": "Bob" }
    ]
  }
}

A single user element would instead produce an object rather than an array, which is the one asymmetry to watch for when consuming the output.

XML vs JSON: what maps and what does not

Common mistakes and pitfalls

• Expecting a single child to be an array. One occurrence of a tag becomes an object; two or more become an array. Code that always treats it as an array will break on single-element documents.
• Assuming comments and processing instructions survive. JSON has no equivalent, so XML comments and PIs are dropped during conversion.
• Forgetting namespaces are not resolved. A prefixed tag keeps its prefix in the key but the namespace URI is not expanded, so two different namespaces using the same prefix would collide.
• Pasting malformed XML. An unclosed or mismatched tag triggers a parse error rather than partial output. Fix the XML first.
• Relying on a perfect round trip. Converting XML to JSON and back will not reproduce attributes versus elements, comments, or original ordering across different tag names.
• Mixed content surprises. An element holding both text and child tags stores the text under #text, which is easy to miss when reading the JSON.

Frequently asked questions