A lightweight, no-dependency JavaScript HTML to JSON library

We needed a very fast way to convert HTML or XML to JSON. A tiny library, dependency-free, efficient, and flexible that can handle complex structures, we can quickly customize for applications, such as:

• HTML editors

• XML data processing

• content sanitizers

• template transformers

• or anywhere you need to treat markup as structured data

For the sake of flexibility on our side, we ended up writing our own: a single-pass, string-based parser that walks the markup once and builds a JSON general tree that can be used across those different use cases. Considering the variety of errors and oddities you find in real-world HTML, we also included a JSON-to-HTML converter. That lets us write unit tests and validate the quality of each conversion by round-tripping HTML → JSON → HTML.

A simple JSON tree is easier to manipulate than raw HTML strings, which is where this library helps. It parses markup into a minimal structural representation, and the same module can render that structure back to HTML.

JavaScript HTML to JSON converter:

• Zero dependencies

• Bidirectional

• Understands both HTML & XML, including namespaces.

• Pretty output — optional pretty-printing with indentation.

The library is an MIT, and if you wish to try it out, you can find more information on our GitHub page below.

Install & get started

npm install @lemonadejs/html-to-json

Github Repository

https://github.com/lemonadejs/html-to-json

What are the limitations, and what is expected for the next version?

• HTML entities like & need better handling;

• Whitespace is preserved exactly, creating a lot of extra entries in the JSON;

• Markup errors are not validated, so no detailed errors are available;

Other useful tools

You can find more tools from the same authors:

JavaScript Data Grid with Spreadsheet Controls
LemonadeJS