Converting XML to JSON using Python?

python json xml converter
Pete Karl II picture Pete Karl II · Oct 10, 2008 · Viewed 225.9k times · Source

I've seen a fair share of ungainly XML->JSON code on the web, and having interacted with Stack's users for a bit, I'm convinced that this crowd can help more than the first few pages of Google results can.

So, we're parsing a weather feed, and we need to populate weather widgets on a multitude of web sites. We're looking now into Python-based solutions.

This public weather.com RSS feed is a good example of what we'd be parsing (our actual weather.com feed contains additional information because of a partnership w/them).

In a nutshell, how should we convert XML to JSON using Python?

Answer

Martin Blech picture Martin Blech · Apr 18, 2012

xmltodict (full disclosure: I wrote it) can help you convert your XML to a dict+list+string structure, following this "standard". It is Expat-based, so it's very fast and doesn't need to load the whole XML tree in memory.

Once you have that data structure, you can serialize it to JSON:

import xmltodict, json

o = xmltodict.parse('<e> <a>text</a> <a>text</a> </e>')
json.dumps(o) # '{"e": {"a": ["text", "text"]}}'

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