Convert XML to JSON without uploading the document

XML lives in the boring, high stakes places: bank and accounting exports, statutory filings, health and insurance integrations, product feeds between suppliers and marketplaces. Those documents carry account numbers and personal records, and the reason somebody is converting one at speed is usually that two systems have to talk by the end of the day. That is exactly the pressure under which a live payload gets pasted into the first tool that appears.

The mapping is genuinely ambiguous, so look at what you got. XML distinguishes an attribute from a child element and JSON has one kind of key. XML has namespaces and prefixes and JSON has none. XML preserves the order of sibling elements and a JSON object makes no promise about key order. Whatever convention the conversion used, your consumer has its own expectation, and the two need to agree.

The repeated element trap deserves a test of its own. A document containing one line item and a document containing three can produce different shapes, an object in one case and an array in the other, which breaks any consumer that was built from a single sample. Convert both cases before you write code against the result.

Verify locality by converting with the network off. It works, and for an integration payload full of customer records that is not a small thing: the document went from a file on your disk to a shape you can read without any third party seeing a single account number.