HTML to Text Converter
Strip HTML tags instantly in your browser — removes markup, scripts, and styles, decodes entities, and leaves you with clean, readable plain text.
What Is HTML-to-Text Conversion?
HTML markup mixes actual content with structural tags (<p>, <div>, <strong>), inline scripts, and stylesheets. "Stripping tags" removes all of that machinery and keeps only what a reader would actually see as text — headings, paragraphs, and list items become plain lines, and everything else (markup, scripts, styles, comments) is discarded.
Entities like & and are also decoded back into their real characters (& and a space), so the result reads the way a browser would display it, not the way it's encoded in the source.
Why Strip HTML Tags?
Plain text is what you need when pasting content into a plain-text field, indexing it for search, running it through a text-only analysis tool, or just reading the actual copy without markup cluttering every line.
How This Tool Works
Paste your HTML into the box below and click Strip Tags. This tool removes <script> and <style> blocks entirely, converts block-level breaks (paragraphs, headings, list items) into line breaks, strips the remaining tags, and decodes HTML entities. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded to any server.
HTML vs. Plain Text
| Feature | HTML | Plain Text |
|---|---|---|
| Formatting | Tags control bold, links, structure | None — just line breaks |
| Scripts and styles | Can be embedded | Not applicable |
| File size | Larger (markup adds bytes) | Smaller |
| Searchable/indexable as raw content | Markup can interfere | Clean, direct |
| Best for | Web pages, rich display | Plain-text fields, search indexing, analysis |
Keep Content as HTML When
- It needs to render with formatting, links, and images in a browser
- You're editing or storing it in a CMS that expects markup
Strip to Plain Text When
- You're pasting content into a field that doesn't support (or shouldn't render) markup
- You're feeding it into a text-analysis tool, search index, or word counter
- You want to read the actual copy without HTML cluttering every line
Common Scenarios for Stripping HTML Tags
Pasting Web Content Into a Plain-Text Field
Copying from a web page often drags along invisible markup and formatting that breaks when pasted into a plain-text email, a code comment, or a form field that doesn't expect HTML. Stripping it first gives you clean text to paste anywhere.
Preparing Copy for a Word Count or Text Analysis Tool
Tags and script content skew a word count or readability score if they're counted as part of the text. Stripping HTML first gives an accurate count of the actual visible content.
Extracting the Body Text From a Page You're Also Converting to PDF
If you're archiving or sharing a page and need both a formatted PDF (via our HTML to PDF tool) and a plain-text copy for searching or quoting, stripping the tags here gives you the second format without re-typing anything.
Cleaning Up a Scraped or Exported Page
Pages scraped from the web, exported from a CMS, or saved from an email client often carry a lot of markup noise around the actual content. Stripping it down to text makes the real content easy to review or repurpose.
Sanitizing User-Submitted HTML for Logging
Before writing user-submitted HTML into a log file or plain-text database column, stripping the tags avoids storing (and re-rendering) markup you don't need in that context.
Other Ways to Strip HTML Tags
You can also strip HTML tags using a command-line tool like Python's html2text library, or by pasting into a plain-text editor that ignores markup on paste. FileCast is useful for a quick, one-off conversion without writing any code.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my HTML uploaded anywhere?
No. Stripping happens entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded to any server.
Does this preserve any formatting at all?
It preserves line breaks — paragraphs, headings, list items, and <br>/<hr> all become new lines in the output — but no bold, italics, links, or other inline formatting, since plain text has no way to represent those.
What happens to <script> and <style> content?
It's removed entirely, tags and content both. Inline JavaScript or CSS is never treated as visible page text, so it won't leak into your output.
Does this decode HTML entities like & or ?
Yes. Common named entities (&, <, >, ", , and others) and numeric entities (', —) are decoded back into their actual characters.
What happens to links — do I lose the URLs?
Yes, by design. This tool extracts visible text only, so <a href="...">click here</a> becomes just "click here" — the URL itself is discarded. If you need the links preserved, this isn't the right tool for that.