PHP: Convert XML To JSON

by

XML is a great format for data exchange. But JSON is used more and more for data exchanging and configuration. In my opinion JSON is a great, because it is more lightweight than XML. More and more apis work with JSON today. Recently I had to convert XML To JSON. Nothing special, just a simple XML String. In this article I’ll show you how to do this with only a few lines of code.

So, for this example I’ll use a file with the filename file.xml, which contains the following XML in it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<customers>
	<customer>
		<address>
			<firstname>John</firstname>
			<lastname>Smith</lastname>
			<street>Somestreet</street>
			<city>Sometown</city>
			<zip>12345</zip>
		</address>
	</customer>
	<customer>
		<address>
			<firstname>Emma</firstname>
			<lastname>Brown</lastname>
			<street>Anotherstreet</street>
			<city>Anothertown</city>
			<zip>23456</zip>
		</address>
	</customer>
</customers>

This XML file is in the same directory as our .php file is.

Next we need a .php file. This file will open the XML file and interpret the files content into an object, using the simplexml_load_file() function. Next, we encode this object to JSON by using the json_encode() function and assign it to a variable named $json.

<?php
// If file exists
if (file_exists('file.xml')) {
	// Load XML file into an object
	$xml = simplexml_load_file('file.xml');
	/*
	Now translate it to an JSON string and 
	assign the JSON string to $json
	*/
	$json = json_encode($xml);
 
	// Output JSON
	print_r($json);
}
else {
    exit('Unable to open XML File');
}
?>

That’s it! Now we have the XML data stored as a JSON string in $json. In this examle, the JSON string will be outputted with print_r($json).

If you don’t have a XML file, but get your XML data as a string, e.g. from a database query, there is a similar way to do this. Just use simplexml_load_string() function instead of simplexml_load_file(). This will look like this:

<?php
// String
$xmlString = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<customers>
	<customer>
		<address>
			<firstname>John</firstname>
			<lastname>Smith</lastname>
			<street>Somestreet</street>
			<city>Sometown</city>
			<zip>12345</zip>
		</address>
	</customer>
	<customer>
		<address>
			<firstname>Emma</firstname>
			<lastname>Brown</lastname>
			<street>Anotherstreet</street>
			<city>Anothertown</city>
			<zip>23456</zip>
		</address>
	</customer>
</customers>';
 
// Load XML string into an object
$xml = simplexml_load_string($xmlString);
/*
Now translate it to an JSON string and 
assign the JSON string to $json
*/
$json = json_encode($xml);
 
// Output JSON
print_r($json);

For more information see:

(Visited 5,557 times, 1 visits today)

2 thoughts on “PHP: Convert XML To JSON”

Leave a Comment