Strip HTML tags from any text instantly. Free online HTML to plain text converter with entity decoding, line break preservation, and Markdown export. Browser-based, no upload.
A free, browser-based HTML stripper that converts HTML markup to clean plain text or Markdown. Choose from 3 modes (Plain text, Markdown, Pretty plain), 9 toggleable operations (strip tags, decode entities, preserve line breaks/lists/links/images/emphasis, collapse whitespace, strip script/style), and 5 quick presets (Email signature, Web page article, Markdown export, Strict strip, Reset). Live stats show input/output character counts, tags removed, entities decoded, and HTML overhead percentage. Uses DOMParser for safe entity decoding — no eval, no upload, no server. Handles malformed HTML gracefully.
Pick Plain text when you need pure body text with no formatting — for SMS, plain-text email, search-engine indexing tests, or pasting into a CRM that strips formatting anyway. Pick Markdown when you want to preserve emphasis, links, and structure for re-publishing on a Markdown-based platform (Notion, GitHub, Obsidian, Hugo, Jekyll, Ghost). Pick Pretty plain when you want readable plain text with paragraph breaks and indented lists — perfect for archiving article content, generating clean text for AI prompts, or pasting into a docs draft.
The most common use case is cleaning content that came out of an email client or a webpage paste — full of nested tables, inline styles, MSO conditional comments, font tags, and span overrides. The "Email signature → plain" preset is tuned for this: aggressive whitespace collapse, smart-quote and em-dash normalisation, and preservation of the visible address / phone / link structure. The "Web page → article" preset is gentler: preserves headings as plain text with extra newlines, keeps unordered lists with bullets, and removes only the technical markup (scripts, styles, tracking pixels). Combine with the linked Whitespace Cleaner for a final pass on stubborn invisible characters.
View source gives you the raw HTML — what you usually want is the readable text behind it, with paragraph breaks, lists, and links preserved as text. This tool does exactly that: strips the markup, decodes entities like &, <, " (which view source leaves as-is), and optionally preserves structural elements as Markdown or pretty-formatted plain text. It is also faster than copy-paste-into-Word followed by clear-formatting, especially for long pages.
Yes. The "Decode HTML entities" option (on by default) converts named entities (&amp; → &, &lt; → <, &gt; → >, &quot; → ", &nbsp; → space, &copy; → ©, etc.) and numeric entities (&#39; → ', &#x27; → ') to their actual characters. The decoding uses the browser's DOMParser API — the same engine that renders entities in real web pages — so it handles every entity correctly, including the obscure ones.
It is valid for the basic structures: bold (**text**), italic (*text*), links ([text](url)), images (), unordered lists (- item), and headings (# Heading). Tables, code blocks, blockquotes, and complex nested structures are simplified rather than perfectly reproduced. For full HTML-to-Markdown conversion of complex pages (with code blocks, tables, blockquotes), use a dedicated tool like Turndown or a Pandoc-based service. For 90% of email signatures, blog posts, and articles, the output here is publication-ready.
No. Everything runs in your browser using the DOM API and regex pipeline. No HTML, no entities, no extracted text is ever sent to a server, logged, or stored. You can paste internal company emails, draft articles, or sensitive markup with full confidence — closing the tab clears everything.
Yes. The DOMParser-based decoding step is forgiving — it accepts HTML the way browsers do, fixing missing closing tags and recovering from minor errors. The regex strip pass handles edge cases like incomplete <tag> patterns. Worst case, malformed input produces slightly imperfect output rather than crashing the tool. For complex broken HTML, the "Strict strip" preset removes everything that looks like a tag, even partial.
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