WIG Converter

Extract text from Wiggle track files (WIG)


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

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

Convert WIG to another file type

To convert WIG tracks to another format, you need UCSC Genome Browser or other Data software.

Convert a file to WIG

To convert other file formats to the "Genomic Data Track" file type, you need software like UCSC Genome Browser or a similar tool.


About WIG files

The .wig (Wiggle) format is a legacy text-based standard developed for the UCSC Genome Browser to display continuous-valued genomic data, such as GC content, probability scores, or transcriptome depth. While the format is human-readable and easy to generate via scripts, it is structurally inefficient for modern, high-throughput sequencing data. .wig files inevitably become massive text blobs that must be parsed sequentially, causing significant performance bottlenecks when loading tracks over a network. Users frequently convert these files because standard .wig data lacks indexing, meaning the entire file often must be processed just to view a specific chromosomal region. For performance, the best practice is converting .wig to BigWig (.bw), a binary, indexed format that supports fast random access. For interoperability with analysis suites like BedTools, users often convert to BED or GFF. In rare cases (specifically within the architecture sector), a .wig file may be a zipped preview image generated by Nemetschek Allplan; these are simply container files that can often be opened by renaming the extension to zip.

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

Users also converted BB, BEDGRAPH, BIGBED and BED files.


FAQ

If you want to convert WIG file to BED, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT or DB, you can use UCSC Genome Browser or similar software from the "Genomic Data Visualization" 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 WIG, try UCSC Genome Browser or another comparable tool in the "Genomic Data Visualization" category.



The WIG 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 WIG converter.