What XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
What JSON Lines is
JSON Lines is one complete JSON object per line, with no enclosing array and no commas between records. The file is not valid JSON as a whole, and that is the point.
Log pipelines, machine learning datasets and anything that appends records or reads them in a stream.
What changes when you convert XML to JSON Lines
The first repeating element is treated as the rows. Attributes are read alongside child elements and prefixed so they do not collide with a same-named tag. Nesting one level deep becomes dotted column names; deeper structures are kept as text.
Every row becomes one line. You can append to the file forever without rewriting it, and a reader can process it a line at a time without holding the whole thing in memory.
What carries over from XML to JSON Lines
One property of the XML has no home in JSON Lines, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
JSON Lines wants a type for each column, and XML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in JSON Lines, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
The identifier 007 comes out of the JSON Lines as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a JSON Lines file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the JSON Lines.