CAR Converter

Extract text from CAR files

Select File
Drop or upload your .CAR file

Online File Converter

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How to extract text from your CAR file

Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your CAR file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert CAR to another file type

To convert your CAR file to another format, you need Xcode or other Developer software.

Convert a file to CAR

To convert other file formats to the "Asset Container" file type, you need software like Xcode or a similar tool.

About CAR files

The .car file extension is a heavily overloaded container format used across completely different industries, creating significant confusion for users trying to open them. The most common variation (34%) is the Compiled Asset Catalog generated by Apple Xcode. These are proprietary binary files found inside iOS (.ipa) and macOS application bundles, used to store optimized images, icons, and textures.

Common Challenges:

Proprietary Lock-in: Apple .car files are compiled specifically for Apple's runtime and cannot be opened natively on Windows or Linux, nor by standard image viewers like Adobe Photoshop.
Extraction Friction: Developers often lose source images and need to reverse-engineer these catalogs to recover the original assets.
Format Ambiguity: A .car file could alternatively be a WSO2 Carbon Archive (a ZIP-based server artifact), a Geutebrück CCTV video export, or a Content Addressable Archive used by the IPFS protocol. Attempting to open a CCTV video in a text editor or a Java archive in a video player will simply fail.

Conversion Solutions:

For Apple Assets: Convert to PNG, SVG, or PDF to recover the visual data for editing or archiving.
For WSO2 & Java Archives: These can often be treated as ZIP files. Rename the extension to view contents.
For CCTV Security Footage: These proprietary exports must be converted to MP4 or AVI for playback in standard media players like VLC Media Player.
For IPFS: Unpack the archive to standard file structures.

Convert.Guru analyzes your CAR file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted ZIP, NIB, XCODE, CAPIBARTER-3, CSAR, CSAR0, CARD, RIDDLE, PNG, JPG, RAR, DYLIB and CTS files.

FAQ

If you want to convert CAR file to EV, CNG, LPG, ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, LZMA or CAB, you can use Xcode or similar software from the "Compiled Asset Catalog" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert XXE, 7Z, Z, PAK, LHA, DEB, UUE, TAR, LZH, ZIP, PKG or RAR files to CAR, try Xcode or another comparable tool in the "Compiled Asset Catalog" category.

The CAR Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CAR converter.