Feather
Feather is a fast, lightweight binary columnar data format jointly developed by the Apache Arrow and pandas teams for efficient data interchange between Python and R. It leverages Apache Arrow's in-memory columnar format to achieve extremely fast read and write speeds with good compression. Feather is optimized for performance rather than long-term archival and is ideal for sharing large data frames between data science tools in a pipeline.
MIME: application/x-feather
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20Feather can be converted to the following 20 formats. Click any format to see its full details.
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a plain-text tabular data format that uses commas to delimit column values and line breaks to separate rows. It is one of the most universally supported data interchange formats, readable by any spreadsheet application, database, or programming language. CSV is ideal for exporting and importing data between different systems due to its simplicity, human readability, and near-universal compatibility.
ENV files store environment variable definitions used to configure software applications, services, and deployment pipelines across different environments. They contain simple key-value pairs in the format KEY=VALUE and are a cornerstone of twelve-factor app development and containerized deployments with Docker and Kubernetes. ENV files are typically excluded from version control to protect sensitive configuration data such as API keys and database credentials.
FWF (Fixed-Width Format) is a plain-text data format where each column occupies a predetermined number of character positions in every row, with no delimiter characters between fields. It originated on mainframes and is still common in government data releases, financial industry feeds, and legacy enterprise system exports. FWF files require a separate schema or data dictionary to correctly parse the column boundaries, making them less self-describing than CSV.
GeoJSON is an open standard for encoding geographic data structures as JSON. It represents points, lines, polygons, and feature collections with coordinates for maps and GIS tools. GeoJSON works well with web mapping libraries and converts cleanly to CSV or JSON tables for analysis.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications, maintained by the W3C. It defines the structure and content of documents using elements and tags, working alongside CSS for visual styling and JavaScript for interactivity. HTML is rendered by web browsers into the visual pages users see, and is the universal output format for documents published on the internet.
INI is a simple, human-readable configuration file format that originated with early versions of Microsoft Windows. It organizes settings into named sections enclosed in square brackets, with key-value pairs defined below each section header. INI files are easy to read and edit by hand, making them a popular choice for application configuration across Windows, Linux, and cross-platform software projects.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, human-readable data interchange format derived from JavaScript object literal syntax. It natively supports objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null, allowing it to represent arbitrarily nested data structures. JSON has become the universal standard for REST API responses, configuration files, and data interchange on the web, with native parsing support in virtually every programming language.
JSONL (JSON Lines, also known as NDJSON) stores one complete, valid JSON object per line in a plain-text file. This line-by-line structure makes it ideal for streaming large datasets, log files, and machine learning training data, since each record can be processed independently without loading the entire file into memory. JSONL is increasingly standard in data engineering, LLM training pipelines, and high-throughput logging systems.
Markdown is a lightweight plain-text markup language created by John Gruber in 2004 to make writing formatted content for the web as easy as possible. It uses minimal punctuation-based syntax to define headings, emphasis, links, images, lists, and code blocks that convert cleanly to HTML. Markdown is the dominant format for README files, software documentation, technical blogs, and static site generators across the entire software industry.
ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) is the open standard spreadsheet format developed by OASIS, used natively by LibreOffice Calc and Apache OpenOffice Calc. It stores spreadsheet data, formulas, charts, and formatting in XML compressed within a ZIP archive, ensuring transparency and long-term accessibility. ODS is a fully open, non-proprietary alternative to Microsoft Excel's XLS and XLSX formats and is supported by Google Sheets.
Apache Parquet is an open-source binary columnar storage format designed for efficient analytical data processing across the big data ecosystem. Its columnar layout enables excellent compression ratios and fast query execution when only a subset of columns is needed. Parquet is the de facto standard format for data lakes and is natively supported by Apache Spark, Hadoop, Presto, Snowflake, and most modern data processing platforms.
PDF (Portable Document Format) was created by Adobe in 1992 and has become the worldwide standard for sharing documents with precisely fixed layouts. It preserves fonts, images, vector graphics, and formatting identically across every operating system, device, and printer. PDF supports digital signatures, encryption, interactive forms, and embedded multimedia, making it essential for official documents, contracts, reports, and professional publications.
TOML (Tom's Obvious Minimal Language) is a configuration file format designed for maximum human readability with a precisely defined, unambiguous specification. It uses a clean syntax for strings, integers, floats, booleans, datetimes, arrays, and nested tables that maps directly to standard dictionary or hash-map data structures. TOML is the official configuration format for Rust's Cargo package manager and is gaining widespread adoption in modern software projects.
TSV (Tab-Separated Values) is a plain-text tabular data format that uses tab characters as column delimiters and newlines to separate rows, making it similar to CSV but avoiding issues when data values contain commas. It is well-supported by spreadsheet applications, relational databases, and scripting languages, and is commonly used for data exports from bioinformatics databases, genome browsers, and text-processing pipelines.
TXT (Plain Text) is the simplest possible file format, containing only unformatted characters encoded in ASCII or Unicode with no styling, images, or structural metadata. It is universally compatible with every operating system, programming language, text editor, and application that handles text. Plain text is used for source code, configuration files, README documents, log files, and any situation where maximum simplicity and portability are required.
XLS is the legacy binary spreadsheet format used by Microsoft Excel from 1987 through the Office 2003 era, based on Microsoft's proprietary Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF). It stores worksheets, formulas, charts, and macros in a binary structure that requires Microsoft's format specification to parse correctly. XLS remains common in older enterprise systems and when compatibility with legacy versions of Excel is required.
XLSX is the default spreadsheet format for Microsoft Excel since Office 2007, built on the Open XML standard and standardized by ISO. It stores worksheets, formulas, charts, pivot tables, and formatting in a compressed ZIP archive of XML files, making it more compact and corruption-resistant than the older XLS format. XLSX is supported by Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc, Apple Numbers, and virtually every modern data tool.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a flexible, human-readable markup language defined by the W3C for structuring, storing, and transporting data across different systems. Unlike HTML, XML uses custom-defined tags chosen by the author to describe the semantic meaning of data, making it self-documenting and extensible. XML underpins numerous data formats, web services (SOAP), configuration standards, and document formats including SVG, DOCX, and RSS.
YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human-friendly data serialization format designed to be more readable than JSON or XML for configuration files and structured data. It uses indentation and minimal punctuation to represent nested data structures, sequences, and mappings in a way that closely resembles natural language. YAML is the native configuration format for Kubernetes, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, Ansible, and countless other modern developer tools.