Are there strict rules for conversion JSON to XML and back?

Question

Are there any strict rules for conversion between JSON and XML?

Program I am working on should be able to output results in both formats, but among all the possible conversion utilities, libraries etc. I could not understand if there are any standard (possibly, "de-facto") for this conversion.

Common problems, as I see, are:

• conversion from one format to other and then back should give result identical to original;

• JSON have arrays - simple nesting of similar child items in the XML would not do, since some XML-processing tools would not preserve the order;

• XML have attributes - their representation as a child items would change original XML when converting back.

Can I found any documentation on this question - or I may use any suitable converter because the lack of such standard?

Thank you in advance for links, advices, guides.

Answer 1

No... There is no strict rule as of yet.

As you imply... Although JSON can be converted to XML, the conversion cannot be robust , because XML tag lists are not, by definition, coupled to any particular data structure, where as JSON data structures are (maps and lists). Thus... JSON files , if converted to XML, cannot be losslessly converted back to JSON (unless of course you embed some nonstandard meta information in the JSON objects which are used for the XML decoding).