Convert XML to R DataFrame Online

Paste an XML table below, edit it if you need to, and get R DataFrame back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.
Edit
Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.
ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

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 R DataFrame is

R code that builds a data.frame from character vectors.

Statistics and R notebooks.

What changes when you convert XML to R DataFrame

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.

stringsAsFactors is set to FALSE explicitly. It has defaulted to FALSE since R 4.0, but being explicit means the snippet behaves the same on older installs.

What carries over from XML to R DataFrame

One property of the XML has no home in R data frame, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.

R data frame 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.

XML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. R data frame has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.

R data frame marks header cells differently from data cells, so the keys are lifted out and written once as a marked header row rather than repeated on every row.

The identifier 007 comes out of the R DataFrame 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 R DataFrame file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the R DataFrame.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

XML in
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<staff>
  <person id="007">
    <name>Halima Yusuf</name>
    <role>Analyst, data</role>
    <started>2024-03-15</started>
    <hours>38.5</hours>
  </person>
  <person id="012">
    <name>Jonah "Jo" Pryce</name>
    <role>Engineer</role>
    <started>2025-11-02</started>
    <hours></hours>
  </person>
  <person id="104">
    <name>Wei Chen</name>
    <role>Manager</role>
    <started>2023-06-30</started>
    <hours>40</hours>
  </person>
</staff>
R DataFrame out
staff <- data.frame(
  id = c("007", "012", "104"),
  name = c("Halima Yusuf", "Jonah \"Jo\" Pryce", "Wei Chen"),
  role = c("Analyst, data", "Engineer", "Manager"),
  started = c("2024-03-15", "2025-11-02", "2023-06-30"),
  hours = c("38.5", "", "40")
  , stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

Questions

How do I convert XML to R DataFrame?

Paste your XML into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the R DataFrame from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

What happens to nested values?

R data frame has no nested cell, so a list or object inside a XML value is flattened into a single cell rather than expanded into extra columns. Split it before converting if the parts need to be separate.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.

Related conversions