How to convert XML to JSON in Python

By Bikram Mondal

In this tutorial, we will learn how to convert XML data to JSON data and also to convert an XML file to JSON data in Python.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language like HTML and used to store and transport data. On the other hand, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a popular data format used for data manipulation. Usually, developers prefer JSON to XML. So we have to learn a way how to convert from XML to JSON. But the conversion will be easy if we convert XML to Python dictionary and then from Python dictionary to JSON.

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Convert XML to JSON in Python

We can convert XML to the Python dictionary using the ‘xmltodict’ module. So,  first of all, ‘xmltodict’ should be installed using the ‘pip‘ command from the command prompt like this.

pip install xmltodict

The screenshot of the result is given below.

How to convert XML to JSON in Python

Now in the python idle, we have to import ‘xmltodict’ and ‘json’ as shown below.

import xmltodict
import json

Now to convert XML to a Python dictionary we use the ‘parse’ method of the ‘xmltodict’ module and to convert the Python dictionary to JSON we use the ‘dumps‘ method of the ‘json’ module. See the below code.

import xmltodict
import json

xml='''<website>
        <name>Codespeedy</name>
        <article>Related to programming</article>
        <message>You can learn easily from codespeedy</message>
    </website>'''

my_dict=xmltodict.parse(xml)
json_data=json.dumps(my_dict)
print(json_data)

Output:

{"website": {"name": "Codespeedy", "article": "Related to programming", "message": "You can learn easily from codespeedy"}}

In the above code, the XML data ‘xml’ is converted into the dictionary ‘my_dict’ by the ‘parse’ method and ‘my_dict’ is converted into the JSON data json_data’ using the ‘dumps’ method’.

Convert XML file to JSON in Python

Let’s consider the following XML file saved as ‘my_xml. xml’.

<website>
    <name>Codespeedy</name>
    <article>Related to programming</article>
    <message>You can learn easily from codespeedy</message>
</website>

Firstly, we should open the ‘.xml’ file using ‘open‘ function and then use ‘read()‘ function to read the file content. Now we can convert it into JSON in the same way we followed earlier.

import xmltodict
import json

with open('my_xml.xml') as xml_file:
    my_dict=xmltodict.parse(xml_file.read())
xml_file.close()
json_data=json.dumps(my_dict)
print(json_data)

Output:

{"website": {"name": "Codespeedy", "article": "Related to programming", "message": "You can learn easily from codespeedy"}}

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2 responses to “How to convert XML to JSON in Python”

  1. Ries says:
    April 15, 2020 at 10:03 pm

    I cannot believe I googled this issue and missed this post so many times and wasted so much time.

    This is great, thank you.

  2. emosturi says:
    April 19, 2020 at 6:28 am

    simple and concise! the way I like it! Great job!

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