HTML to Text Converter

Strip every HTML tag from markup and get clean, readable plain text — entities decoded, structure preserved.

🔒 Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is uploaded or stored on a server.

The HTML to Text Converter strips all markup out of HTML and leaves clean, readable plain text. Paste page source, an HTML email, a CMS export or a scraped snippet, and every tag disappears instantly — while the structure survives: paragraphs and headings keep their own lines, list items become bullets, and table cells stay separated so they paste neatly into a spreadsheet. Entities are decoded too, so & becomes & and   becomes an ordinary space.

Stripping tags properly is harder than it looks. The classic regex approach breaks on attributes that contain angle brackets, leaves entities encoded, and mashes paragraphs into one blob. This tool instead hands your markup to the browser's own HTML parser — the same engine that renders web pages — so it reads the markup exactly as a browser would. Scripts, styles and hidden metadata are removed along with their contents, not just their tags. And parsing happens in an inert document: scripts in pasted HTML are never executed, so pasting untrusted markup is safe.

Two options tailor the output: “Keep link URLs” writes each link's address in parentheses after its text, so no destinations are lost; “Collapse blank lines” tightens the result into a compact list. From there, chain other tools — count the words with the Word Counter, pull addresses out with the Email Extractor, or fix curly quotes with the AI Text Cleaner. As always, your markup never leaves your browser.

How to use

  1. Paste your HTML — page source, an HTML email, or anything copied with markup in it.
  2. The plain-text version appears instantly, with paragraphs, headings and bullets preserved.
  3. Tick “Keep link URLs” if you want each link's destination kept in parentheses.
  4. Use “Collapse blank lines” for a compact result, or leave it off to keep paragraph spacing.
  5. Copy the text, or download it as a .txt file.

Examples

Cleaning an HTML email
Paste the source of a newsletter and get just the readable text — no tags, no tracking markup, links optionally kept as URLs in parentheses.
Quoting from a web page
Copied text drags hidden markup into some editors; running it through the converter first gives you plain text that pastes cleanly anywhere.
Auditing page copy
Paste a page's HTML source to extract every visible word — then run it through the Word Counter or Readability Checker to audit the content.
Recovering text from a table
An HTML table converts with cells separated by tabs — paste the result into Excel or Sheets and the columns line up.

Frequently asked questions

Is it safe to paste untrusted HTML?
Yes. The markup is parsed into an inert, detached document — scripts never execute, styles never apply, and nothing is fetched from the network. It is the standards-defined safe way to read HTML.
What happens to scripts and styles?
<script>, <style>, <noscript>, <template> and <iframe> blocks are removed together with everything inside them — you get the visible text, not the plumbing.
Are HTML entities decoded?
Yes, all of them — &amp; → &, &nbsp; → space, &euro; → €, numeric references included — because a real HTML parser does the decoding, not a lookup table.
How are lists and tables handled?
List items each get their own line, prefixed with a dash when “Keep list bullets” is on. Table cells are separated with tabs and rows with line breaks, so a pasted table drops straight into a spreadsheet.
What does “Keep link URLs” do?
With it off, a link contributes only its visible text. With it on, the destination follows in parentheses — “our pricing (https://example.com/pricing)” — so the text stays useful outside the browser. Anchor and javascript: links are skipped.
How is this different from the AI Text Cleaner?
They solve different problems: this tool removes HTML markup; the AI Text Cleaner fixes typographic characters (curly quotes, em dashes, invisible spaces) in plain text. For copied web content with both problems, run HTML to Text first, then the cleaner.

Related tools

AI Text CleanerStrip smart quotes, em dashes, invisible Unicode and odd spaces from AI-generated or pasted text.Email & URL ExtractorPull every email address, URL or number out of any text — de-duplicated and one per line.Remove Line BreaksStrip line breaks, collapse extra spaces, trim whitespace and delete blank lines — all with simple toggles.Word CounterLive word count, character count, reading time and keyword density — instantly as you type.Find & ReplaceReplace every occurrence of a word or phrase, with case-sensitive and whole-word options.