HTML to Plain Text

An HTML to text converter strips every tag out of a block of HTML markup and leaves only the text a browser would actually display. This tool works entirely in your browser: paste raw HTML source and the conversion runs automatically, giving you back clean text you can drop into an email, a spreadsheet, or a plain-text document. It's the fastest way to strip HTML tags from content copied out of a web page, a CMS export, or an HTML email template without opening a code editor.

The converter is built for a specific, common problem: text copied from a web page rarely comes over clean. It drags along span tags, inline styles, tracking attributes, and empty divs that a word processor or a plain-text field doesn't need and often can't handle. Pasting that markup into a document, a text file, or a form can leave broken formatting behind even after you think you've cleaned it up by hand.

Two toggles control how the conversion behaves. "Preserve line breaks" turns paragraph breaks, headings, and list items back into readable line breaks and bullets instead of collapsing everything into one run-on line. "Decode HTML entities" turns encoded characters like & and   back into the plain characters they represent, such as & and a normal space, so the output reads the way the original text was meant to read.

Stripping HTML tags means removing every opening and closing tag, like <p>, <div>, <span>, and <a>, while keeping the text that sits between them. This tool does that by scanning the input for anything wrapped in angle brackets and deleting it, which handles ordinary content tags like paragraphs, headings, links, bold, and italics cleanly and predictably.

There's one case worth knowing about before you paste anything: tags are removed, but the text sitting inside a <script> or <style> block is not treated any differently from regular content. If your HTML includes embedded JavaScript or CSS, that code's text will remain in the output once the surrounding tags are gone. For clean results, strip out <script> and <style> blocks before pasting, or check the output for leftover code and delete it manually.

• Opening and closing tags (<p>, </p>, <div>, <span>, <a>) are removed automatically
• Text between tags is preserved exactly as written
• Attributes like class, id, and style disappear along with their tags
• Code inside <script> and <style> tags stays in the output as plain text — remove those blocks first if present

When you copy text from a web page or a document like Google Docs or Word and paste it somewhere else, most apps don't just paste the visible words. They paste the underlying HTML, complete with font-size spans, color styles, and tracking classes the original site or document used for its own layout. That's why pasted text sometimes shows up in a different font, size, or color than the rest of your document, even though none of that markup is visible on screen.

Running that same clipboard content, or the page's raw HTML source, through this converter removes all of it in one step. The output is markup-free text with no embedded styling information at all, so wherever you paste it next inherits the destination's own formatting instead of carrying over invisible leftovers from the source.

HTML can't contain a literal < or & character in its text without breaking the markup, so those and other special characters are written as entities instead: &amp; for an ampersand, &lt; and &gt; for angle brackets, &quot; and &apos; for quote marks, and &nbsp; for a non-breaking space. This tool recognizes the common named entities, including &copy;, &reg;, &trade;, &mdash;, &ndash;, &hellip;, &laquo;, and &raquo;, and converts each one back to its plain character when "decode HTML entities" is checked.

It also decodes decimal numeric references, the &#169; style codes that represent a character by its Unicode number, converting the number straight to the matching character. One limitation worth knowing: hexadecimal numeric references, written as &#xA9; instead of &#169;, are not recognized and pass through unchanged. If your source HTML uses hex entity codes, expect a few of them to survive the conversion untouched.

• &amp; becomes &, &lt; becomes <, &gt; becomes >, &quot; becomes a quote mark, &apos; becomes an apostrophe
• &nbsp; becomes a regular space, &mdash; becomes an em dash, &hellip; becomes an ellipsis
• &#169; (decimal numeric reference) converts automatically to the copyright symbol
• &#xA9; (hexadecimal numeric reference) is not decoded and stays as-is

With "preserve line breaks" turned on, the converter doesn't just strip tags blindly — it uses certain tags as signals for where a line break belongs before deleting them. A <br> becomes a single line break, a closing </p> or </h1> through </h6> becomes a blank line to separate paragraphs and headings, and a closing </div> becomes a line break to keep separate blocks from running together.

List items get special treatment too: each <li> is converted to a line starting with a bullet character, so a bulleted or numbered HTML list reads as a plain-text list instead of one long sentence. After all the substitutions, the tool collapses any run of three or more blank lines down to two and trims leading and trailing whitespace, so the result doesn't end up with large gaps from HTML that had a lot of nested empty containers.

This converter works on the HTML text you paste, not on a live web page, so it can't fetch a URL for you — you need to copy the page's HTML source (via "View Page Source" or your browser's inspector) or the raw HTML string itself and paste that in. It also doesn't parse HTML into a structured document the way a browser does; it uses pattern matching to find and remove tags, which is fast and works well for typical content but has edge cases.

Tables are the clearest example: <table>, <tr>, and <td> tags are stripped like any other tag, but there's no special handling to add spacing or line breaks between table cells, so a multi-column table often comes out as one run of text with the cell contents jammed together. Severely malformed HTML, such as an unclosed tag or angle brackets used outside of real markup, can also produce unexpected results since the tool has no way to know the author's intent.

The most frequent use is cleaning content copied from a website or CMS before pasting it into a document, an email, or a plain-text field that doesn't accept HTML. It's also useful for preparing a plain-text fallback version of an HTML email template, since many email clients and spam filters expect a text alternative alongside the HTML version.

Developers use it to quickly preview what an HTML string will read like once rendered, without opening a browser, and writers and researchers use it to pull the visible text out of scraped or exported HTML for a word count, a readability check, or import into a spreadsheet or database that only accepts plain text.