What the CSV looks like after converting a DBF
The first line holds the field names and nothing else. Each record after it is one row. Dates come out as dates rather than strings like 19980314, numbers come out without the padding DBF stores them with, and logical fields read TRUE or FALSE. Visual FoxPro null values become empty fields, so an import doesn't mistake them for zero.
Text in Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Korean or any other script stays readable. That matters more for CSV than for most formats, because a CSV is plain text: once the wrong letters are written into it, no program can recover the right ones.
How to convert DBF to CSV
- Upload the .dbf file with the box at the top of the page.
- Pick CSV as the output.
- Convert and download the .csv file.
We write the CSV straight from our own DBF reader, with no office suite in between, so it's fast. A table with 100,000 rows takes about 0.6 seconds after the upload finishes. The work happens on our servers, not in your browser.
Why the code page decides whether your CSV is usable
Many DBF files come from programs of the 1990s that stored text in a regional code page, such as Windows-1250 for Central European languages or CP866 for DOS-era Russian systems. The file header has one byte that says which code page was used. We read that byte, check for UTF-8, and when the header is blank we work out the code page from the text. Our old converter skipped this step, which is why it scrambled names and addresses.
When CSV is the wrong choice
CSV holds one table of plain values. It has no column widths, no number formats and no way to mark a column as a date, so the program that opens it has to guess. If the data is going to someone who will open it in Excel, DBF to XLSX gives them a sheet with real dates and readable columns. CSV is the better pick for imports into another database, a script or a web app, where a plain, fast file is what the importer wants.
Files that won't convert
dBASE 7 tables use a newer header layout that we don't read yet, and you'll get a message saying so. The same happens with a file that has a .dbf name but isn't a DBF table. CSV itself has no row limit, so large tables aren't a problem.
More DBF and CSV conversions
Other exports from the same reader include DBF to XML and DBF to PDF. To go back the other way, CSV to DBF builds a DBF table from a CSV file. The DBF converter lists every DBF option and the CSV converter lists what CSV turns into.