Novus Convert
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Data format

INI converter

A .ini file is the oldest surviving configuration format in common use: key=value lines, optionally grouped under [section] headers, with no types and no nesting. Everything is a string until the program reading it decides otherwise.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop INI 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 INI comes from

INI files date to MS-DOS and were formalised by Windows 3.x, where win.ini and system.ini held the entire operating system's configuration before the registry replaced them in Windows 95. The format never had a specification, which is why every parser disagrees slightly — about comment characters, about duplicate keys, about whether values may be quoted — and yet it outlived the platform that created it.

How INI works

  • Structure is one level deep: sections contain keys, and sections cannot nest.
  • There are no types; a value is a string and any interpretation is the reader's.
  • Comment syntax is unspecified in practice — ; and # are both common, and parsers differ.
  • Duplicate key behaviour is undefined: some parsers take the first, some the last, some build a list.
  • Because there is no standard, an INI file is only reliably readable by the tool that wrote it.

When to use INI

  • Legacy application configuration, especially on Windows
  • Simple flat settings where a full configuration language is overkill
  • Migrating old configuration into TOML, JSON or environment variables
  • Extracting settings for comparison across environments

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Trivially readable and editable by anyone, with no syntax to learn
  • Supported everywhere by decades of accumulated tooling
  • Impossible to get badly wrong for flat key/value data

Limitations

  • No specification, so parsers genuinely disagree on real files
  • No types, no nesting, no arrays
  • Ambiguous handling of comments, quoting and duplicate keys

Compatibility

Every language has an INI parser, and Windows still exposes the original GetPrivateProfileString API for reading them. The disagreements between implementations are the real compatibility problem, not availability. Novus Convert parses it locally and converts to JSON, TOML, YAML, plain text and ENV.

None. Comments are dropped, since the target formats mostly have nowhere to put them.

Convert INI to another format

Convert other formats to INI