Extract text from PL files
To convert your PL file to another format, you need Perl / SWI-Prolog or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "Scripting Language File" file type, you need software like Perl / SWI-Prolog or a similar tool.
The .PL extension serves multiple technical roles, primarily identifying Perl Scripts used for web development and text processing, or Prolog Source Code used in artificial intelligence. While powerful for developers, these raw code files are inaccessible to standard users without an interpreter like Strawberry Perl or SWI-Prolog. They cannot be executed by double-clicking and appear as unformatted text in basic editors. Additionally, .PL is used for Samsung TV Channel Lists (proprietary binary data) and U.S. Census Bureau redistricting data (Public Law 94-171), which are notoriously difficult to visualize. Legacy engineering systems also use it for Unix Plot Files, occasionally wrapping PDF content in a .pl wrapper.
For documentation and archiving, convert Perl and Prolog scripts to PDF or RTF to preserve syntax highlighting without risk of accidental execution. For Census data, the raw ASCII format is unusable for analysis; converting to CSV or Excel (.XLSX) is essential for use in Microsoft Excel. If you suspect a file is a misnamed document or Plot file, inspecting the header and converting to PDF often resolves access issues.
Convert.Guru analyzes your PL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted PERL, PL1, PDF, PL2, TXT, PLW, JPG, HTML, LIB, BMK, RTF, PLN and ASHX 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 PL converter.