Is there an option to parent the fields of an _attributes object on the parent object.

[michaelgwelch]

Pardon me if that question is very poorly worded.

Basically I have an XML document where each XML element has attributes, but no child elements. So it's safe to skip the creation of an _attributes object. The attributes themselves can go right on the generated JSON object.

Example: Given

<a val="5"/>
<a val="6"/>

I'd like the output to be (Note, I can make a plural myself as in this example)

{
  "as": [
    {
      "val": "5"
    },
    {
      "val": "6"
    }
  ]
}

rather than

{
  "a": [
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "5"
      }
    },
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "6"
      }
    }
  ]
}

[michaelgwelch]

I'm going to close this. I just realized I can easily use map to create the output I want.

[nashwaan]

@michaelgwelch , Can you share an example of how you used map as I had previously many users asked for a similar result.

[michaelgwelch]

@nashwaan Sure I can post the code I used. But others trying to follow my advice, my example is relatively simple.

The first thing I did was manually edit my JSON file so that instead of having something like

{
  "a": [
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "5"
      }
    },
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "6"
      }
    }
  ]
}

I had

  [
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "5"
      }
    },
    {
      "_attributes": {
        "val": "6"
      }
    }
  ]

In other words, I removed the top level parent object, leaving me with just a JSON array. So applying map was quite simple. Assuming a file named events.json the following bit of code should do the trick (assume a filename of convert.js):

#!/usr/bin/evn node
const origEvents = require('./events.json');

const newEvents = origEvents.map( (val) => { return val["_attributes"] });

console.log(JSON.stringify(newEvents, null, 2))

Then from bash

$ chmod +x convert.js
$ ./convert.js > output.json

Note: my objects actually had dozens of fields, but for the sake of this example that isn't relevant. Just the shape of the JSON is what is relevant.

To recap:

I started with XML that had this shape:

<a val="5" />
<a val="6" />

Then I used xml-js in compact mode to get the JSON at the top of this comment. Manually removed the parent object and then ran the map function.

[1mike12]

Although mapping works, it's annoying if your documents follow the element-attribute format, where it really makes way more sense to have the attribute kvs be added directly to the element object. Here's a quick working pr that makes this work #195