DBF to CSV

The dBase table format (.dbf) dates back to the 1980s but is still very much alive today - most notably as the attribute table of every Esri shapefile (.shp), and in older accounting and inventory systems. If you want to inspect this attribute data without GIS software or a legacy tool, CSV is the fastest route.

This tool reads the file entirely locally in the browser - directly against the dBase file format: header data, field descriptors and the fixed row length are evaluated byte by byte. Character fields, numbers, booleans and dates (to ISO format YYYY-MM-DD) are typed correctly. Records marked as deleted are skipped, exactly as every current dBase tool does.

An honest note: memo fields (type M) point to a separate companion .dbt file, which is not provided here - those columns therefore stay empty instead of showing a meaningless pointer value. For the actual attribute data (numbers, text, dates, booleans), the result is complete.

Specifications

In 3 steps

1. Drop or pick your .dbf file.
2. The tool reads header, fields and rows locally.
3. Download the CSV file.

Limitations: Memo fields (type M) stay empty, since the companion .dbt file is not supplied. Records marked as deleted are skipped. Text is read in the matching encoding, auto-detected from the file header's own language driver ID (including Windows-1251 Russian, GBK Chinese, Shift-JIS Japanese, EUC-KR Korean, Big5 Traditional Chinese, Windows-1250/1253/1254/1257 and more); when that ID is missing or unsupported, the text is first checked for valid UTF-8 and read as UTF-8 if so, otherwise decoding falls back to Windows-1252. Very large tables need memory.

FAQ

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