XML to JSON Converter.

Convert XML to JSON online — free and private

An XML to JSON converter turns XML markup into structured JSON that modern APIs and JavaScript can use directly. Paste your XML above, press Convert to JSON, and the parser maps elements, attributes, and text into clean JSON. Unlike server-based tools, this one parses everything in your browser, so you can convert XML to JSON online without uploading sensitive files.

How to convert XML to JSON in three steps

1. Paste your XML into the input, or click “Load sample”.
2. Choose your options — type inference, force arrays, and whether to keep or ignore attributes.
3. Convert and export — copy the JSON or download it as data.json.

Attributes, arrays, and namespaces handled properly

XML has features JSON does not, so handling them well matters. Attributes are preserved under an @ prefix, mixed text goes under #text, and repeated elements are collected into arrays automatically — with a force-array option for predictable output. Namespace prefixes are kept, CDATA is read as text, and type inference converts numbers and booleans.

Concretely, this XML:

<catalog>
  <book id="1" lang="en">
    <title>Dune</title>
    <price currency="USD">9.99</price>
  </book>
</catalog>

becomes:

{
  "catalog": {
    "book": {
      "@id": 1,
      "@lang": "en",
      "title": "Dune",
      "price": { "@currency": "USD", "#text": 9.99 }
    }
  }
}

Note price: it has both an attribute and text content, so the text lands under #text rather than being silently thrown away. Converters that drop attributes lose the currency entirely — and you do not find out until the numbers are wrong.

The single-element array trap

This is the bug that bites almost everyone converting XML feeds. Two <book> elements produce an array. One <book> element produces a plain object. So code that works fine against a catalogue of five books crashes the day a search returns exactly one result — and it looks like a random production incident rather than a conversion problem.

Force arrays fixes it: every child becomes a list, whether there is one item or a hundred, so data.catalog.book[0] is always valid. If you are converting an API response you will consume in code, turn it on.

Convert XML to JSON in Python, JavaScript, or the terminal

Python (xmltodict) — the closest match to this tool's output:

import json, xmltodict

with open("data.xml") as f:
    data = xmltodict.parse(f.read(), attr_prefix="@", cdata_key="#text")

print(json.dumps(data, indent=2))

xmltodict has the same single-element quirk — pass force_list=("book",) to pin specific tags as arrays.

JavaScript / Node.js (fast-xml-parser):

import { XMLParser } from "fast-xml-parser";

const parser = new XMLParser({
  ignoreAttributes: false,
  attributeNamePrefix: "@",
  isArray: (name) => ["book", "item"].includes(name),  // force arrays
});
const data = parser.parse(xmlString);

Command line (yq) — quick for a one-off in a pipeline:

yq -p=xml -o=json eval data.xml > data.json

Common XML to JSON problems (and fixes)

“My attributes disappeared.” Some converters ignore them by default. Here they are kept under an @ prefix — and @id or @currency is usually the field you needed most.

“My code breaks when there is only one record.” The single-element array trap above. Enable force arrays.

“My SOAP response has soap: prefixes everywhere.” Namespace prefixes are preserved, so soap:Body stays soap:Body and you can navigate straight to the payload rather than guessing at renamed keys.

“My leading zeros vanished.” Type inference turned 007 into 7. Switch inference off for lossless string output.

“My XML will not parse.” XML is far stricter than HTML — every tag must be closed, and & must be written &. An unescaped ampersand in a URL is the most common cause.

Why use this XML to JSON tool?

It is fully client-side with no upload and no size cap — a real advantage over tools that send your XML to a server, and XML tends to be exactly the kind of data you do not want to upload: SOAP payloads, enterprise exports, and legacy system dumps. Need the reverse? Use the JSON to XML converter. Related: YAML to JSON, CSV to JSON, JSON formatter to tidy the output, and JSON to TypeScript to type it. Learn more in our guide on how to convert XML to JSON.