Extract text from GXL files
To convert your GXL file to another format, you need Graphviz or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "Graph Data Interchange" file type, you need software like Graphviz or a similar tool.
The .GXL extension most commonly refers to the Graph eXchange Language, an XML-based standard designed to share complex graph data (nodes and edges) between software tools. It is widely used in software re-engineering, bioinformatics, and academic research to represent diagrammatic data. Because GXL is essentially raw XML text, you cannot simply double-click to "view" the graph as an image; it must be parsed or converted into a visual format. A frequent issue for researchers and developers is that few modern image viewers support GXL natively, requiring command-line tools like Graphviz (gxl2gv) to convert the data into DOT, SVG, or PNG for visualization.
Alternatively, in the .NET development ecosystem, a .GXL file may be a GridEX Layout file generated by Janus Systems components. These files store user interface preferences - such as column arrangement, sorting, and grouping - for data grids in Windows applications. These are proprietary configuration files meant to be loaded programmatically, not edited manually.
For graph data, the best conversion strategy is transforming GXL to DOT (for Graphviz), GraphML (for Gephi/yEd), or JSON (for web visualization). For Janus layouts, viewing them as XML or TXT helps verify settings, but they generally must be re-imported into the GridEX control.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GXL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted VEO, TM7 and META4 files.
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 GXL converter.