How to convert XML to JSON in Python?

Geuis_68788 0
Viewed 111718

Possible Duplicate:
Converting XML to JSON using Python?

I'm doing some work on App Engine and I need to convert an XML document being retrieved from a remote server into an equivalent JSON object.

I'm using xml.dom.minidom to parse the XML data being returned by urlfetch. I'm also trying to use django.utils.simplejson to convert the parsed XML document into JSON. I'm completely at a loss as to how to hook the two together. Below is the code I'm tinkering with:

from xml.dom import minidom
from django.utils import simplejson as json

#pseudo code that returns actual xml data as a string from remote server. 
result = urlfetch.fetch(url,'','get');

dom = minidom.parseString(result.content)
json = simplejson.load(dom)

self.response.out.write(json)
xml python json
7 Answers

I think the XML format can be so diverse that it's impossible to write a code that could do this without a very strict defined XML format. Here is what I mean:

<persons>
    <person>
        <name>Koen Bok</name>
        <age>26</age>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name>Plutor Heidepeen</name>
        <age>33</age>
    </person>
</persons>

Would become

{'persons': [
    {'name': 'Koen Bok', 'age': 26},
    {'name': 'Plutor Heidepeen', 'age': 33}]
}

But what would this be:

<persons>
    <person name="Koen Bok">
        <locations name="defaults">
            <location long=123 lat=384 />
        </locations>
    </person>
</persons>

See what I mean?

Edit: just found this article: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/05/31/converting-between-xml-and-json.html

user_564950

Jacob Smullyan wrote a utility called pesterfish which uses effbot's ElementTree to convert XML to JSON.

user_417590

One possibility would be to use Objectify or ElementTree from the lxml module. An older version ElementTree is also available in the python xml.etree module as well. Either of these will get your xml converted to Python objects which you can then use simplejson to serialize the object to JSON.

While this may seem like a painful intermediate step, it starts making more sense when you're dealing with both XML and normal Python objects.

Soviut_469140

In general, you want to go from XML to regular objects of your language (since there are usually reasonable tools to do this, and it's the harder conversion). And then from Plain Old Object produce JSON -- there are tools for this, too, and it's a quite simple serialization (since JSON is "Object Notation", natural fit for serializing objects). I assume Python has its set of tools.

user_595010
Related