Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your XDR file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert XDR to another file type
To convert your XDR file to another format, you need Microsoft Visual Studio or other Developer software.
Convert a file to XDR
To convert other file formats to the "Schema & Serialization" file type, you need software like Microsoft Visual Studio or a similar tool.
About XDR files
The .xdr extension represents two distinct but technical file formats that often cause confusion due to their incompatibility with modern tools.
Microsoft XML-Data Reduced (Legacy Schema): Originally introduced by Microsoft in the late 1990s, this is a text-based XML schema used to define the structure of data in older applications like Internet Explorer 5, BizTalk, and SQLXML. It was a competitor to DTDs but was ultimately superseded by the W3C standard, XSD. Users typically encounter these files when maintaining legacy ASP.NET systems or migrating old databases. The main disadvantage is that modern XML parsers (including those in Visual Studio Code) often reject XDR syntax, treating it as invalid or unrecognized code.
External Data Representation (Binary Serialization): Developed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), this is a standard for data serialization used in Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and scientific data exchange. Unlike the Microsoft format, these are often binary definitions or source code files compiled by tools like rpcgen. They allow different computer architectures to share data but are unreadable to humans without specific decoding tools.
Conversion Advice:
For Microsoft XDR: The standard workflow is converting .XDR to XSD (XML Schema Definition) to ensure future compatibility. This is often done using the xsd.exe tool found in the .NET SDK.
For Sun/RPC XDR: These files are typically "compiled" into C/C++ header files (an .H file) using rpcgen, or parsed into JSON or XML if they contain serialized data dumps.
Convert.Guru analyzes your XDR file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert XDR file to XD, INI, CFG, CONF, CONFIG, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, ENV or PROPERTIES, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio or similar software from the "Data Serialization & Schema" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert ZSHRC, CONF, RCFILE, GITCONFIG, RC, PLIST, BASHRC, CONFIG, PROFILE, INI, PREFS or CFG files to XDR, try Microsoft Visual Studio or another comparable tool in the "Data Serialization & Schema" category.
The XDR 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 XDR converter.