Question 1

Why does a number like 25 in my XML become the string "25" in the JSON output, not the number 25?

Accepted Answer

Because XML has no native type system — every value between tags is just text, and there is no reliable way to guess whether "007" should become the number 7, the string "007", or stay as-is. Rather than guess and sometimes guess wrong, every XML text value is converted to a JSON string consistently. If you need real numbers and booleans, you will need to convert those specific fields after the fact.

Question 2

What happens to XML comments and processing instructions?

Accepted Answer

They are dropped — JSON has no equivalent place to put them, so and are silently ignored during conversion; only actual elements, attributes, and text survive.

Question 3

How do repeated sibling elements become a JSON array?

Accepted Answer

Elements that share the same tag name and the same parent are collected into a JSON array in document order — ab becomes {"items": {"item": ["a", "b"]}}. A tag that appears only once under its parent stays a single value rather than a one-item array.

Question 4

What happens if my XML has a mismatched or unclosed tag?

Accepted Answer

You'll get a clear parse error rather than a best-effort guess at the structure — the browser's XML parser refuses to guess how to recover from malformed markup, so a mismatched closing tag or an unclosed element is reported as an error instead of silently producing incorrect JSON.

XML to JSON

Predictable Structure

Clear Error Messages

Local Processing

Frequently Asked Questions