Oracle Linux - convert XML to JSON

for people who are not that big a fan of XML files and still need to use XML structures every now and than when they get data from another system the xml2json solution might be a good thing to look into. The xml2json util is an opensource utility written in Python which will convert XML data into JSON data, as well as the other way arround. Using this on the Oracle Linux commandline when you code bash scripting can save a lot of time. Especially if you use xml2json in combination with jq you can save a lot of time in most cases.

As an example, we take an example XML file we found on the Microsoft website. And for convenience I create a gist from it so you can more easily grab it from the command line. The XML contains a list of books and the details of the books.

If we now would like to do something with it in a JSON format we can can use the xml2sjon command as shown below to get a valid JSON structure we can work with.

./xml2json.py -t xml2json -o test1.json test1.xml --strip_text

As we have a JSON strcuture we can also use jq on it. You can find jq also on the Oracle YUM repository for your use. the xml2json utility is however not included in the Oracle YUM repository at this moment so you will have to grab it from github where you will find the xml2json.py file which you need to ensure is on your Oracle Linux system to be able to use it.