Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your HDF5 file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert HDF5 to another file type
To convert HDF5 data files to another format, you need HDFView or other Data software.
Convert a file to HDF5
To convert other file formats to the "Hierarchical Data Container" file type, you need software like HDFView or a similar tool.
About HDF5 files
The .HDF5 file is a data container built on the Hierarchical Data Format version 5. It stores massive, complex datasets, often used in scientific computing, artificial intelligence, and aerospace. Think of it as a virtual file system within a file, holding multidimensional arrays, folders, and metadata. You can view these files using HDFView from The HDF Group or via programming languages like Python using the h5py library. However, .HDF5 files pose significant challenges. They are binary, highly structured, and often exceed hundreds of gigabytes. You cannot open them in standard text editors or basic spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel. Sharing this raw data with non-technical stakeholders requires specific software environments or heavy applications. They are essentially closed off to general web browsers and typical office suites. To make the data readable for general analysis, you must extract datasets into flat formats like .CSV, .JSON, or .XML. Note that exporting a multidimensional array to a flat 2D .CSV file strips away the hierarchical folder structure and rich metadata. Standard online converters fail with .HDF5 because they lack the specialized libraries to parse its binary tree, and the files are usually too large for standard web uploads. This file format is difficult to open or convert because often only the original software or specialized scripts can properly read or export the internal data. Our platform inspects the file, and if our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or extracting datasets may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your HDF5 file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert HDF5 file to CSV, NETCDF or JSON, 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 files to HDF5, try HDFView or another comparable tool in the "Scientific Data Storage" category.
The HDF5 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 HDF5 converter.