Reverse Engineering UYAP's .udf File Format: What's Inside a Turkish Court Document?

Description and use

The udf2md script converts Turkish judiciary .udf files to Markdown, preserving structure and formatting while keeping data client‑side.

Problem

Legal professionals in Turkey need to read and process UYAP .udf documents, but the proprietary format is not natively supported by mainstream tools or LLMs.

Outcome

The udf2md tool transforms UYAP .udf files into Markdown, preserving headings, formatting, tables, and images, while keeping all data in the browser for privacy.

Workflow

• 1. Load .udf file into browser as ArrayBuffer.
• 2. Use JSZip to unzip and list entries.
• 3. Extract content.xml (and any embedded images).
• 4. Parse XML with DOMParser or similar.
• 5. Map XML elements (template, properties, elements, paragraph, content, table) to Markdown constructs.
• 6. Convert color attributes from Java RGB integers to hex.
• 7. Output Markdown string for display or further processing.

Evidence

A .udf file is a ZIP archive containing a single content.xml file that follows a custom XML schema

Source

We built udf2md — a 100% client‑side converter. No data leaves your browser.

Source