Converting ATOM XML to JSON using Node.js

I was reading an article that had some code to convert XML to JSON using Node.js and node-xml2js. The code they used was very simple and since I deal with ATOM XML a lot I wanted to know how well it would work with converting ATOM to JSON.

Note: I’m using Node version 0.6.7

The first thing I did was create a new folder to store the files. Then I added a few Node modules (I installed these locally but feel free to install them globally):

$ npm install xml2js
$ npm install eyes

Note: eyes does a very nice and clean output of values for inspection

The code is borrowed from the original article and modified a little:

var fs = require('fs'),
    eyes = require('eyes'),
    xml2js = require('xml2js');

var parser = new xml2js.Parser();

parser.on('end', function(result) {
    eyes.inspect(result);
});

fs.readFile(__dirname + '/atom_entry.xml', function(err, data) {
    parser.parseString(data);
});

Save the above code as app.js

Create another file called atom_entry.xml and save it to the same folder as the app.js file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
    <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
    <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
    <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
    <author><name>John Doe</name></author>
    <content>Some text.</content>
</entry>

Simply run the script and examine the results which will be in JSON:

{
    content: 'Some text.',
    @: { xmlns: 'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' },
    id: 'urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a',
    author: { name: 'John Doe' },
    updated: '2003-12-13T18:30:02Z',
    title: 'Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok'
}

We can throw a little more complex (and borrowed) ATOM XML entry at it as well and you’ll see it does a decent enough job in the translation:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<entry>
    <title>Atom draft-07 snapshot</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
          href="http://example.org/2005/04/02/atom"/>
    <link rel="enclosure" type="audio/mpeg" length="1337"
          href="http://example.org/audio/ph34r_my_podcast.mp3"/>
    <id>tag:example.org,2003:3.2397</id>
    <updated>2005-07-31T12:29:29Z</updated>
    <published>2003-12-13T08:29:29-04:00</published>
    <author>
        <name>Mark Pilgrim</name>
        <uri>http://example.org/</uri>
        <email>f8dy@example.com</email>
    </author>
    <contributor>
        <name>Sam Ruby</name>
    </contributor>
    <contributor>
        <name>Joe Gregorio</name>
    </contributor>
    <content type="xhtml" xml:lang="en"
             xml:base="http://diveintomark.org/">
        <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <p><i>[Update: The Atom draft is finished.]</i></p>
        </div>
    </content>
</entry>

The results:

{
    author: {
        email: 'f8dy@example.com',
        uri: 'http://example.org/',
        name: 'Mark Pilgrim'
    },
    content: {
        div: {
            @: { xmlns: 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' },
            p: { i: '[Update: The Atom draft is finished.]' }
        },
        @: {
            type: 'xhtml',
            xml:lang: 'en',
            xml:base: 'http://diveintomark.org/'
        }
    },
    contributor: [
        { name: 'Sam Ruby' },
        { name: 'Joe Gregorio' }
    ],
    updated: '2005-07-31T12:29:29Z',
    link: [
        {
            @: {
                href: 'http://example.org/2005/04/02/atom',
                rel: 'alternate',
                type: 'text/html'
            }
        },
        {
            @: {
                href: 'http://example.org/audio/ph34r_my_podcast.mp3',
                length: '1337',
                rel: 'enclosure',
                type: 'audio/mpeg'
            }
        }
    ],
    published: '2003-12-13T08:29:29-04:00',
    title: 'Atom draft-07 snapshot',
    id: 'tag:example.org,2003:3.2397'
}

With a little more work you could have a decent system for converting ATOM XML to JSON for a project.