Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your HDF file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert HDF to another file type
To convert HDF data files to another format, you need HDFView or other Data software.
Convert a file to HDF
To convert other file formats to the "Scientific Data Container" file type, you need software like HDFView or a similar tool.
About HDF files
The .HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) is a specialized data container designed to store and organize large amounts of numerical data and complex structures. Originally developed at NCSA and currently supported by The HDF Group, it is the standard format for scientific research, aerospace telemetry, and big data analysis. Read more about its structure on Wikipedia. The major disadvantage of the .HDF format is its extreme complexity and density. These files act like internal file systems, holding multi-dimensional arrays, tables, and nested metadata that can span multiple gigabytes. You cannot open them natively in a web browser or standard spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel. Viewing them requires dedicated, heavy software like HDFView or programming environments using Python, MATLAB, or R. This makes sharing raw data with non-technical stakeholders incredibly frustrating and creates a high barrier to entry. To make the data accessible, conversion is required. For tabular data sharing and direct use in Excel, convert specific datasets within the .HDF to CSV. For web applications and REST APIs, convert extracted arrays to JSON or XML. For archival or geospatial uses, converting to NetCDF is highly recommended.
Convert.Guru analyzes your HDF file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert HDF file to XSA, TIFF, CSV, NETCDF, NC, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI or CFG, you can use HDFView or similar software from the "Scientific Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to HDF, try HDFView or another comparable tool in the "Scientific Data Storage" category.
The HDF 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 HDF converter.