UDL Converter

Extract text from UDL files


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

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

Convert UDL to another file type

To convert your UDL file to another format, you need Microsoft Windows or other Settings software.

Convert a file to UDL

To convert other file formats to the "Connection String File" file type, you need software like Microsoft Windows or a similar tool.


About UDL files

A .UDL (Universal Data Link) file is a configuration container used by Microsoft Windows to store connection strings for OLE DB data sources. While these files essentially contain plain text (often encoded as Unicode UTF-16), the Windows operating system treats them as executable objects. Double-clicking a .UDL automatically launches the Data Link Properties dialog box instead of a text editor, which is a major drawback when you simply want to view the raw connection string, copy credentials, or edit the provider details manually. This proprietary handling makes .UDL files difficult to work with on non-Windows platforms like macOS or Linux, and they are becoming less common in favor of modern appsettings.json or web.config patterns. To bypass the system lock and view the contents safely, users should convert .UDL to TXT for raw editing. For developers migrating legacy systems, converting the connection parameters into structured JSON or XML is the most practical workflow for modern application deployment.

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

Users also converted XLSX, UDF, PDF, EXE, BIN and DOCX files.


FAQ

If you want to convert UDL file to DB, SQLITE, SQLITE3, MDB, ACCDB, DBF, ODB, FDB, GDB, MYD, FRM or SQL, you can use Microsoft Windows or similar software from the "Database Connection Configuration" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert NDF, SQLITE3, BAK, RDB, SQL, DB4, MDF, MDB, LDF, DB, DB3 or SQLITE files to UDL, try Microsoft Windows or another comparable tool in the "Database Connection Configuration" category.



The UDL 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 UDL converter.