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Data format

EDI converter

A .edi file is an electronic data interchange document — a business record such as a purchase order, invoice or shipping notice, encoded as delimited segments for machine-to-machine exchange. The extension itself is ambiguous: it is used by both ANSI ASC X12, the North American standard, and UN/EDIFACT, the international one. The two are different formats, and you can tell them apart from the first three bytes.

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Drop EDI files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where EDI comes from

Electronic data interchange predates the web by decades, growing out of 1960s transport and logistics telexes and formalised in the 1970s and 1980s by ASC X12 in the United States and by UN/EDIFACT internationally. Neither standard ever claimed .edi as its own, so the extension became a generic industry label rather than a format identifier — which is why a .edi file tells you what a document is for but not which grammar it is written in.

How EDI works

  • ASC X12 interchanges begin with a fixed-width ISA envelope; UN/EDIFACT interchanges begin with an optional UNA service string advice followed by UNB.
  • Those first three bytes are the reliable discriminator — the extension, the MIME type and the file size are all uninformative.
  • In X12 the delimiters are read from fixed positions in the ISA segment; in EDIFACT they are declared explicitly by the UNA segment, which is why the same parser cannot serve both.
  • Both standards nest envelope → group → message and pair control numbers between each header and its trailer.
  • The payload is plain text with no compression and no character-set declaration inside the document itself.

When to use EDI

  • Opening a .edi file a trading partner sent when you do not know which standard it uses
  • Converting an X12 interchange to JSON or CSV so it can be read, diffed or loaded
  • Confirming an interchange's envelope and control numbers during a partner dispute
  • Inspecting a document containing commercial terms without sending it to a hosted converter

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • The extension almost every real EDI file actually arrives with
  • Plain text, so it survives any transport and can be inspected with ordinary tools
  • Structurally self-describing enough that envelopes and control numbers can be validated without a trading-partner guide

Limitations

  • Names a family, not a format — a .edi file may be X12, EDIFACT, TRADACOMS or a partner's own dialect
  • Element meanings live in an implementation guide the file does not carry
  • Nothing renders it usefully; it must be translated to be read

Compatibility

Because .edi is a category label rather than a format, tools that claim to open it usually support exactly one dialect. Novus Convert reads both: ASC X12 from its ISA envelope and UN/EDIFACT from its UNA or UNB header, choosing between them by inspecting the first three bytes rather than trusting the filename. Either converts locally to JSON, CSV or normalized text. EDIFACT's release character is honoured, so a delimiter escaped inside a value — a company name like "Smith ?+ Sons" — survives the round trip instead of splitting the element in two.

Envelope metadata is preserved for both standards: sender and receiver identifiers, date and time, version and control numbers, plus X12's usage indicator and EDIFACT's declared delimiters. Implementation guidelines, message directories and code lists are not interpreted; raw element values are carried through unchanged, with EDIFACT composites split on the component separator.

Convert EDI to another format