Convert dBase to CSV

Working from a dBase file

dBase III and IV gave the format its five original field types, and that small vocabulary is why a dBase table converts so cleanly: there is very little in one that a modern database cannot hold exactly.

• →Character, Numeric, Date, Logical and Memo are the whole type system. A Numeric field declared with no decimals becomes a 64-bit integer; one with decimals becomes an exact decimal of the declared width and scale.
• →dBase has no time-of-day type at all, so a Date field converts to a pure date and never to a timestamp at midnight.
• →dBase IV memo blocks carry an 8-byte header and dBase III's do not, so a .dbt written by either generation is read with the block layout it actually uses.

The shape of the CSV files you get

CSV is where the type information stops, so what is left to describe is the file itself: how a row is terminated, which fields are quoted, and how a value that used to have a type is spelled out as characters.

• →Rows end with a carriage return and a line feed, the RFC 4180 ending, while a newline inside a quoted field stays the single character it always was. The encoding is UTF-8 with no byte-order mark in front of it.
• →Quotes go on only where they are needed - a field holding a comma, a double quote or a newline - and a quote inside a field is doubled rather than escaped with a backslash. Every other field is written bare.
• →Decimal values are written digit for digit and never through a floating-point number, so a money column that was exact in the source is still exact in the file. Booleans are written lower case, as true and false, which is the spelling this converter's own reader takes back as a boolean.

Reading dBase

• →Numeric fields with decimals are read as exact decimals, not floats, so currency does not drift.
• →Character field widths are read from the header and carried into the target.
• →The code page declared in the file header is used, so Cyrillic, Western European and other legacy DOS encodings decode correctly instead of turning into mojibake. 157 code pages are recognised.
• →Files written by dBase III or Clipper declare no code page at all — the header byte for it did not exist yet. For those, the most plausible encoding is chosen by inspecting the text, and the conversion tells you it had to guess. The API takes a sourceEncoding parameter (e.g. cp866) to force it instead of guessing, though the widget above does not have a control for it yet.
• →Memo columns keep their text in a separate .dbt or .fpt file. If the .dbf declares one and it was not uploaded, the conversion stops and tells you which file to add, rather than handing you a table whose long text is silently blank.

Writing CSV

• →One file per table, with a header row.
• →NULL is written as an empty field, never the word "None".
• →Binary data is written as hex, which is reversible.

Convert dBase to something else

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• SQLite
• DuckDB
• Excel

Convert something else to CSV

• Excel
• SQLite
• SQL dump
• JSON
• XML
• Parquet
• DuckDB
• MS Access
• PostgreSQL backup