Should you convert XML to JSON? Probably not.

If you have to though (and have decent control over the providers and consumers of the XML and JSON), then there are some decent conventions out there for lossless and near-lossless conversion, such as:

• abdera
• badgerfish
• cobra
• gdata
• parker (pretty lossy, but my personal favorite)
• yahoo (okay, maybe they're not all great, but they tried)
• aws-api (conventions seen in AWS XML based APIs)

Presently this only supports Parker, BadgerFish and AWS API and is largely happy path testing with the examples provided by each convention. That being said, eventually this will come up to a > 0 major version when that is all worked out.

Otherwise, this does NOT handle massive XML documents with grace, as it converts to a full JSON/Map object in memory.

A port of the great Python library xmljson

iex> XmlJson.Parker.deserialize("<root><dog>cat</dog></root>", preserve_root: true)
{:ok, %{"root" => %{"dog" => "cat"}}}
iex> XmlJson.Parker.serialize(%{"root" => %{"dog" => "cat"}}, preserve_root: "root")
{:ok, "<root><dog>cat</dog></root>"}

iex> XmlJson.BadgerFish.deserialize("<root attr=\"hello\"><dog>cat</dog></root>")
{:ok, %{"root" => %{"@attr" => "hello", "dog" => %{"$" => "cat"}}}}
iex> XmlJson.BadgerFish.serialize(%{"root" => %{"@attr" => "hello", "dog" => %{"$" => "cat"}}})
{:ok, "<root attr=\"hello\"><dog>cat</dog></root>"}

Based on common conventions seen in at least the EC2 and ELBv2 XML APIs

iex> XmlJson.AwsApi.deserialize("<root><member><dog>cat</dog></member></root>")
{:ok, %{"root" => [%{"dog" => "cat"}]}}
iex> XmlJson.AwsApi.serialize(%{"root" => [%{"dog" => "cat"}]})
{:ok, "<root><member><dog>cat</dog><member></root>"}
iex> XmlJson.AwsApi.serialize_as_params(%{"root" => [%{"dog" => "cat"}, %{"dog" => "horse"}]})
{:ok, %{"root.member.1.dog" => "cat", "root.member.2.dog" => "horse"}}

The package can be installed by adding xml_json to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:xml_json, "~> 0.5.0"}
  ]
end

The docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/xml_json.

MIT Copyright (c) 2020 Ben Brewer