Markup Converters: Which One Do You Need?
These four tools cover two unrelated jobs — moving structured data between JSON and XML, and moving formatted documents between Markdown and HTML. They look similar because they're all "markup," but the right tool depends entirely on which job you're actually doing.
Quick picker
- Have structured data in JSON, need XML for a config file or legacy API? Use the JSON to XML Converter — arrays and nested objects map to repeated and nested elements.
- Have an XML file, need it as JSON for your code? Use the XML to JSON Converter — attributes land under @attributes, repeated elements become arrays.
- Wrote something in Markdown, need it as HTML for a page or email? Use the Markdown to HTML Converter — headings, links, lists, and code blocks all convert cleanly.
- Have HTML content, need it back as clean Markdown for docs or a wiki? Use the HTML to Markdown Converter — parsed with your browser's own DOM parser, not a fragile regex.
Worked scenario: publishing a Markdown changelog as an HTML page, then archiving the data as XML
- Write a release changelog in Markdown, then run it through the Markdown to HTML Converter to get clean HTML ready to paste into a CMS or static site that doesn't render Markdown natively.
- Separately, if the release metadata (version, date, list of fixes) also needs to feed a legacy system that expects XML, shape that data as a JSON object first, then run it through the JSON to XML Converter to produce well-formed XML for that system.
- Months later, if you need to pull that XML release history back into a modern tool, run it through the XML to JSON Converter to get structured JSON again — repeated release entries come back as an array, not a jumble of overwritten fields.
All markup tools
- JSON to XML Converter Convert JSON to well-formed XML, with sensible handling of arrays, attributes, and nested objects.
- XML to JSON Converter Convert XML to JSON using your browser's own XML parser, including attributes and repeated elements.
- Markdown to HTML Converter Convert Markdown to clean HTML — headings, bold/italic, links, lists, code blocks, and blockquotes.
- HTML to Markdown Converter Convert HTML back to clean Markdown, parsed with your browser's own DOM parser.
Frequently asked questions
Why are there separate JSON ↔ XML and Markdown ↔ HTML converters instead of one universal converter?
Because XML and HTML aren't the same kind of format, and treating them as interchangeable would produce worse output for both. XML's structure is built around elements and attributes representing arbitrary data — the natural counterpart to JSON's objects and arrays. Markdown and HTML, meanwhile, are about document formatting — headings, bold text, links, lists — with block-level semantics that don't map onto JSON at all. A single "universal" converter would have to guess which of these two very different jobs you meant, and guess wrong often enough to be unreliable. Format-specific logic for each pair gets it right instead.
I converted JSON to XML — why did some fields become attributes and others become nested elements?
XML has two ways to attach data to an element (attributes and child elements) where JSON only has one (nested key-value pairs), so a JSON-to-XML conversion has to make a consistent choice. The JSON to XML Converter turns object keys into child elements and repeats sibling elements for arrays, which keeps the mapping predictable and reversible — running the result back through XML to JSON gets you a structurally equivalent JSON document.
Will converting Markdown to HTML and back to Markdown give me the exact same file?
Not always byte-for-byte, but the meaningful content survives. HTML can express things Markdown has no syntax for — specific inline styles, certain nested structures — so a round trip normalizes toward whatever both formats can represent cleanly. For standard Markdown (headings, bold/italic, links, lists, code blocks, blockquotes) the round trip is very close to lossless; the more exotic the original HTML, the more it gets simplified on the way back.
My XML has repeated sibling elements — how does XML to JSON know to make those an array?
The XML to JSON Converter looks at whether a parent element has multiple children with the same tag name; if it does, they become a JSON array instead of overwriting each other as a single key. Attributes are kept separately under an @attributes key so they don't get confused with child element data — both handled automatically by your browser's own XML parser, not a hand-rolled string parser.