HXA Converter

Extract text from Help attribute definitions (HXA)


Drop or upload your .HXA file
✈

How to extract text from your HXA file

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

Convert HXA to another file type

To convert HXA Attribute definitions to another format, you need Visual Studio or other Developer software.

Convert a file to HXA

To convert other file formats to the "Help System Source File" file type, you need software like Visual Studio or a similar tool.


About HXA files

The .HXA file format is a Microsoft Help 2 Attribute Definition File. It is a plain text, XML-formatted file used by the legacy Microsoft Help 2 system (popularized in Visual Studio 2002-2008) to define custom attributes for help topics. The main disadvantage of this format is its severe obsolescence. Microsoft abandoned Help 2 over a decade ago in favor of modern web-based documentation. You cannot natively open compiled Help 2 collections on modern systems without specialized viewer software, and maintaining the raw source files like .HXA is impractical. If you are migrating old software documentation to modern systems like Markdown or HTML, you need to extract and convert these files. Since .HXA files are fundamentally XML, standard text editors like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code can open them. However, standard online document converters fail to process them because they do not understand the specific Microsoft schema and expect a standard document format. Furthermore, this is a closed, proprietary format deeply tied to the old Microsoft Help Compiler. If our analysis detects the supported underlying XML format, viewing or extracting the text remains highly possible.

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


FAQ

If you want to convert HXA file to TMP, TEMP, CACHE, LOG, BAK, OLD, NEW, PART, DOWNLOAD, CRDOWNLOAD, LOCK or PID, you can use Visual Studio or similar software from the "Help Topic Attribute Definition" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert DEVICE, CACHE, SOCK, SYMLINK, PID, MOUNT, FIFO, LOG, PIPE, TMP, JUNCTION or TEMP files to HXA, try Visual Studio or another comparable tool in the "Help Topic Attribute Definition" category.



The HXA 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 HXA converter.