Upload an XML file and convert it to a JSON file quickly in your browser for easy use in apps, APIs, and data workflows.
Converting XML to JSON is fast and private with XConvert's free browser-based tool. No signup required, no data uploaded to any server — the entire conversion happens locally in your browser.
Paste or load your XML — Copy your XML data into the input panel on the left, or load an .xml file directly from your device. The tool accepts any well-formed XML including documents with namespaces, attributes, CDATA sections, and deeply nested elements.
Configure conversion settings — Choose how XML attributes should be represented in JSON (prefixed keys, nested objects, or discarded), how repeated elements map to arrays, and whether to preserve or strip namespace prefixes. These settings let you tailor the output to your application's needs.
Convert instantly — Click the convert button and your JSON output appears immediately in the right panel. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript — your data stays on your device and is never transmitted to any server.
Copy or download the result — Copy the JSON to your clipboard with one click, or download it as a .json file. You can also edit the output directly in the panel before saving.
Need the reverse operation? Use our JSON to XML converter. For other transformations, explore the XML to YAML converter or the JSON to YAML converter.
XML to JSON conversion transforms data from Extensible Markup Language (XML) into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). This is one of the most common data format transformations in modern software development, driven by the industry's broad shift from XML-centric architectures toward JSON-based APIs and data stores.
XML was the dominant data interchange format through the 2000s, powering SOAP web services, enterprise application integration, and document-oriented standards across healthcare, finance, and government. It offers a rich feature set including attributes, namespaces, mixed content, processing instructions, comments, and powerful schema validation through XSD. JSON emerged as a lighter alternative, offering a simpler syntax with native support for common data types (strings, numbers, booleans, arrays, objects) and direct compatibility with JavaScript and most modern programming languages.
The conversion from XML to JSON is not lossless. XML has features — attributes, comments, processing instructions, namespace declarations, mixed content, and document type definitions — that have no direct equivalent in JSON. A practical converter must make decisions about how to represent or discard these features. Understanding these trade-offs is essential for producing JSON output that accurately represents the original XML data for your specific use case.
| Feature | XML | JSON |
|---|---|---|
| Syntax | Nested elements with tags | Key-value pairs, arrays |
| Data types | All values are text | String, number, boolean, null, object, array |
| Attributes | Supported on elements | No concept of attributes |
| Namespaces | Full namespace support | Not supported |
| Comments | Supported (<!-- -->) |
Not supported in spec |
| Mixed content | Text and elements interleaved | Not supported |
| CDATA sections | Supported for raw text | No equivalent |
| Schema validation | XSD, DTD, RelaxNG | JSON Schema |
| Array representation | Repeated sibling elements | Native [] syntax |
| Typical use | SOAP APIs, enterprise, documents | REST APIs, web apps, mobile |
REST API modernization — Organizations migrating from SOAP to REST APIs need to convert XML response formats to JSON. Modern REST APIs overwhelmingly use JSON as their data format, and converting existing XML data structures to JSON is a key step in API modernization projects.
Mobile application backends — Mobile apps on iOS and Android work most efficiently with JSON data. When backend systems or third-party services provide data in XML, converting to JSON reduces parsing overhead on mobile devices and simplifies client-side data handling with native JSON support in Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript.
Frontend web development — JavaScript applications consume JSON natively with JSON.parse(), while XML requires a separate DOM parser. Converting XML data sources to JSON simplifies frontend code, reduces bundle size by eliminating XML parsing libraries, and aligns with modern framework conventions in React, Vue, and Angular.
Database migration — When migrating data from XML-based storage (XML databases, XML columns in relational databases) to document databases like MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Elasticsearch, converting XML to JSON is a necessary transformation step since these databases store data in JSON or JSON-like formats.
Data analysis and processing — Data science tools, Python libraries (pandas, json), and analytics platforms work more naturally with JSON than XML. Converting XML datasets to JSON makes them accessible to these tools without custom XML parsing logic.
Microservices communication — Microservices architectures use JSON for inter-service communication via REST or message queues. When integrating with legacy services that produce XML, converting their output to JSON at the boundary keeps the rest of the ecosystem consistent.
The most critical aspect of XML to JSON conversion is understanding what information can be lost in translation. XML is a richer format than JSON in several dimensions, and a naive conversion will silently discard data that may be important to your application. Being aware of these gaps lets you choose the right conversion settings and handle edge cases before they become bugs in production.
Attributes are the most common source of information loss. XML elements can carry attributes alongside their child elements and text content — for example, <price currency="USD">29.99</price> contains both an attribute (currency) and text content (29.99). JSON has no attribute concept, so converters typically use conventions like prefixing attribute keys with @ (producing {"price": {"@currency": "USD", "#text": "29.99"}}) or flattening attributes into regular keys. If your conversion discards attributes, you lose metadata that may be essential. Similarly, XML comments (<!-- ... -->), processing instructions (<?xml-stylesheet ... ?>), and document type declarations are almost always dropped during conversion since JSON has no way to represent them. If these carry meaningful information in your XML, you need to extract them separately before converting.
Mixed content and CDATA sections present additional challenges. Mixed content — where an XML element contains both text and child elements interleaved, like <p>Click <a href="url">here</a> for details</p> — has no clean JSON representation because JSON object values are discrete, not interspersed with text. Converters handle this differently: some concatenate all text, some use arrays of text and element objects, and some simply lose the text positioning. CDATA sections (<![CDATA[...]]>) are used in XML to include raw text that shouldn't be parsed as markup. In JSON conversion, CDATA content is typically extracted as a plain string value, which is correct for most cases but loses the explicit signal that the content should not be interpreted as structured data. When working with XML that contains HTML snippets or code blocks inside CDATA, verify that the converted JSON preserves the content correctly and that downstream consumers handle it as raw text.
Understand your XML structure first — Before converting, examine whether your XML uses attributes, namespaces, mixed content, or CDATA sections. These features require specific conversion settings to preserve correctly. Use XConvert's XML formatter to pretty-print and inspect your XML structure.
Configure attribute handling deliberately — Don't use default attribute handling blindly. If your XML relies heavily on attributes (common in formats like SVG, XHTML, and SOAP), choose a conversion mode that preserves them as prefixed keys (@attr) or nested objects. If attributes aren't important for your use case, discarding them produces cleaner JSON.
Watch for implicit arrays — XML represents arrays as repeated sibling elements with the same name, but a single occurrence looks identical to a non-array element. Good converters let you specify which elements should always be treated as arrays. Configure this to avoid inconsistent output where sometimes you get an object and sometimes an array for the same element name.
Handle namespaces explicitly — XML namespace prefixes (like soap:Body or xsi:type) can produce awkward JSON keys. Decide whether to preserve prefixes, strip them, or map them to a different convention. Stripping namespaces works for simple documents but can cause key collisions in complex multi-namespace XML.
Validate the output — After conversion, validate that the JSON is well-formed and that critical data from the XML is present. Spot-check attributes, array elements, and nested structures. Use XConvert's JSON formatter to pretty-print and inspect the result.
Test round-trip fidelity if needed — If you need to convert JSON back to XML later, test the round trip early. Convert XML to JSON and then back to XML using the JSON to XML converter to see what information survives. This reveals any lossy conversions you need to address in your settings or post-processing.
XML attributes are converted to JSON keys using a configurable prefix, typically @. For example, <user id="5" role="admin"><name>Alice</name></user> becomes {"user": {"@id": "5", "@role": "admin", "name": "Alice"}}. The @ prefix distinguishes attributes from child elements in the JSON output. You can configure the prefix or choose to discard attributes entirely if they aren't needed for your use case.
XML comments (<!-- ... -->) and processing instructions (<?target data?>) are discarded during conversion. JSON has no syntax for comments or processing instructions, so there is no way to represent them. If these contain important information — such as configuration hints or documentation — extract them separately before converting. This is a fundamental limitation of the JSON format, not the converter.
By default, namespace prefixes are preserved in JSON key names. For example, <soap:Body> becomes a key "soap:Body" in JSON. You can configure the converter to strip namespace prefixes (producing just "Body"), which creates cleaner JSON but risks key collisions if multiple namespaces define elements with the same local name. For most REST API migration scenarios, stripping namespaces is fine. For complex multi-namespace documents, preserving them is safer.
Completely. The XML to JSON converter runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript. No data is uploaded to any server, no network requests are made with your content, and nothing is stored or logged. Your XML data never leaves your device, making this tool safe for sensitive, proprietary, or regulated data.
CDATA sections (<![CDATA[content]]>) are converted by extracting their text content as a plain JSON string value. For example, <script><![CDATA[if (a < b) { return true; }]]></script> becomes {"script": "if (a < b) { return true; }"}. The CDATA wrapper is removed since JSON strings handle special characters through escape sequences. The content itself is fully preserved.
Mixed content — where an element contains both text and child elements, like <p>Hello <b>world</b> today</p> — is one of the hardest XML features to represent in JSON. The converter typically produces a structure like {"p": {"#text": ["Hello ", " today"], "b": "world"}} or similar, depending on the conversion mode. Because JSON doesn't support interleaved text and objects, the positional relationship between text and elements may not be perfectly preserved. Review the output carefully when converting mixed content XML.
Yes. Since the conversion runs in your browser, performance depends on your device's memory and processing power. Most modern devices handle XML files up to 50–100 MB comfortably. For very large files, you may notice a brief delay during conversion. If you're working with files larger than 100 MB, consider splitting them into smaller documents or using a command-line tool for batch processing.
When the converter encounters multiple sibling elements with the same name, it automatically groups them into a JSON array. For example, <users><user>Alice</user><user>Bob</user></users> becomes {"users": {"user": ["Alice", "Bob"]}}. A single occurrence produces a plain value, not an array. This can cause inconsistencies — if you expect an array but the XML only has one element, you get a string instead. Configure the converter to force specific elements into arrays to avoid this issue.
JSON objects do not guarantee key order per the specification, though most modern JSON parsers and JavaScript engines preserve insertion order. The converter outputs JSON keys in the same order as the XML elements appear in the source document. However, if downstream code sorts or reorders JSON keys, the original XML element order may be lost. If element order is critical, consider using JSON arrays to explicitly preserve sequence.
The converter processes the XML content and does not fetch or validate against external DTD or XSD schemas referenced in the document. DTD declarations and schema references are stripped from the output since JSON has no equivalent. The conversion operates on the XML structure as-is. If your XML relies on DTD-defined default attribute values or entity definitions, those must be resolved in the XML before conversion — the converter works with the literal XML content it receives, not the schema-expanded version.