Xml to Json to xml reversible conversion json-lib

Question

I am trying to do reversible xml-json-xml generic conversion using json-lib which according to its documentation does the conversion as described in Converting Between Xml And Json. According to the document:

A structured XML element can be converted to a reversible JSON structure, if

all subelement names occur exactly once, or

subelements with identical names are in sequence.

I tried the following code snippet:

String xml ="<z><y>dfsdfs</y><y>sdf</y><x>afdf</x></z>";
System.out.println("Original Xml: " + xml);
XMLSerializer xmlSerializer = new XMLSerializer(); 
xmlSerializer.setForceTopLevelObject(true);
xmlSerializer.setTypeHintsEnabled(false);
JSON json = xmlSerializer.read( xml );  
String jsonString = json.toString(2);   
System.out.println("Converted Json: " + jsonString);
JSON json2 = JSONSerializer.toJSON( jsonString );  
String xml2 = xmlSerializer.write( json2 );  
System.out.println("Converted Xml:" + xml2);

Notice the sample xml does follow the conditions. However, the result is:

Original Xml: <z><y>dfsdfs</y><y>sdf</y><x>afdf</x></z>

Converted Json: {"z": {
  "y":   [
    "dfsdfs",
    "sdf"
  ],
  "x": "afdf"
}}

Converted Xml:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<o><z><x>afdf</x><y><e>dfsdfs</e><e>sdf</e></y></z></o>

Notice that

element order has changed. It seems to sort the sub elements while serializing the xml.
We have some additional o and e elements inserted

Are there any settings I am missing with json-lib to prevent these two issues?

I did notice that a javascript library https://code.google.com/p/x2js/ seems to work well (albeit other issues), but I am looking for one that is already available in java. I want one that preserves xml structure along with element order. My XML documents do satisfy the two conditions above on subelements.

I've done something similar using Gson to read/write JSON and handling XML with SAX. This is of course a 2-step conversion as you always pass from Java but in my case it works in every scenario. You just need to take care of handling potential inconsistency in the Java code. — elbuild, Dec 27 '13 at 19:28

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 05 '14 at 07:44

Not sure that it would still help now but I can do that by using another library : the one from http://www.json.org/

import org.json.JSONObject;
import org.json.XML;

String xmlString = "<z><y>dfsdfs</y><y>sdf</y><x>afdf</x></z>";
System.out.println("Initial XML : " + xmlString);
JSONObject jsonObj = (XML.toJSONObject(xmlString));
System.out.println("Converted JSON : " + jsonObj.toString());
System.out.println("Back to converted XML : " + XML.toString(jsonObj));

You'll need this in your pom if you're using maven :

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.json</groupId>
   <artifactId>json</artifactId>
   <version>20140107</version>
</dependency>

Xml to Json to xml reversible conversion json-lib

1 Answers1