Re: Asking for recommendations of xml 2 json open source projects

On 24 Jan 2023, at 02:28, John Cowan <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:



On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 8:05 AM Peter Flynn <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

How does it deal with XML-->JSON for deep mixed content? I have TEI
documents with analytic markup, on which the publisher's rendering and
the user's linguistic or semantic analysis depends, nested up to 10
levels deep. I am under pressure from some quarters to "make the markup
simpler" by using JSON.

Sure, it's straightforward.  Each XML element is a JSON array whose first element is the element name as a JSON string, whose second element is the attribute mapping as a JSON object, and whose remaining elements are the content as JSON strings or arrays.  The attribute mapping can be omitted if it is empty.


It's straightforward to produce a mapping that retains all the XML infoset (to your example, add namespaces, comments, PIs...). It's not straightforward to produce a mapping to JSON that is in any way "simpler" than the original, or that remotely resembles the "natural" way of representing the same information in JSON.

For example,
<list><item>A</item><item>B</item></list>

would be naturally represented in JSON as {"list": ["A", "B"]}, not as ["list", ["item", "A"], ["item", "B"]].

Michael Kay
Saxonica