KIF Converter

Extract text from KIF files


Drop or upload your .KIF file
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How to extract text from your KIF file

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

Convert KIF to another file type

To convert your KIF file to another format, you need Kifu for Windows or other Game software.

Convert a file to KIF

To convert other file formats to the "Board Game Notation" file type, you need software like Kifu for Windows or a similar tool.


About KIF files

A .KIF file is the standard game record format for Shogi (Japanese Chess), containing a sequential log of moves, player metadata, and handicap settings. It follows the Kifu notation standard, using a mix of Arabic and Japanese numerals (e.g., ７六歩) to describe board coordinates. These files are the native format for Kifu for Windows, the ubiquitous software for managing Shogi records.

The catch for users is character encoding. Most .KIF files are encoded in Shift-JIS (a legacy Japanese encoding), which causes them to open as garbled "mojibake" text on modern UTF-8 systems or Western versions of Windows. Furthermore, because they are plain text, they do not inherently display the visual board state. Users frequently need to convert .KIF files to CSA or .SFEN to analyze games with modern Shogi engines (like YaneuraOu), or to PDF and PNG to generate visual diagrams for publishing and sharing. Converting the text encoding from Shift-JIS to UTF-8 is also a common requirement for web compatibility.

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

Users also converted SOR files.


FAQ

If you want to convert KIF file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Kifu for Windows or similar software from the "Shogi Game Record" 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 KIF, try Kifu for Windows or another comparable tool in the "Shogi Game Record" category.



The KIF 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 KIF converter.