Convert HTML to Plain Text

How it works

Paste the HTML code into the left pane; the tag-free plain text appears instantly on the right. The tool removes opening and closing tags, drops script and style blocks together with their contents — no code or style rules leak into the text —, deletes HTML comments and decodes entities such as &,   and ç into their real characters. A 40 KB chunk of HTML copied from a news page's source collapses, the moment you paste it, into a few KB of readable text with headings and paragraphs on their own lines; list items get a leading dash. The links option is there for building reference lists: choose Text + URL and every link is followed by its address in parentheses. The result line reports how many tags were removed and how far the character count dropped; copy the output or download it as a .txt file.

This tool is also known as html to text, strip html tags, remove html tags online, html tag remover, extract text from html.

What is HTML?

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the markup language that builds the skeleton of web pages: it uses angle-bracket tags to say which part of the text is a heading, which is a paragraph and which is a link. The browser reads that markup and turns it into the visual page; when you copy the source instead, the markup arrives interleaved with the text. This tool's job is to pick the human-written content out of that mixture — the markup goes, the words stay.

What is tag?

A tag is HTML's building block inside angle brackets: <p> opens a paragraph, </p> closes it, <a href="..."> makes a link. Most tags work as an opening–closing pair with the actual content between them; a few, like <br>, stand alone. During cleanup the tag itself and its attributes are dropped and the text between the pair is kept. Script and style tags are the exception: what sits between them is code rather than text, so they are removed together with their contents.

What is entity?

An entity is the encoded spelling of a character that has special meaning in HTML or is hard to type: &amp; stands for the ampersand, &lt; for the less-than sign, &nbsp; for the non-breaking space. There is also a numeric form — &#231; and &#xE7; both mean ç. In text copied from page source these codes ruin readability; the tool decodes every named entity defined in HTML and every numeric one into real characters, and leaves anything it does not recognize untouched so no data is lost.

Layout and hidden content: what the cleanup loses — and what it reveals

Tags do not only carry appearance, they carry layout: the structure that aligns table cells, splits text into columns and places images is built from tags. Cleaning destroys that structure irreversibly — table rows collapse into plain stacked lines and images are dropped entirely, with no placeholder text left behind. When you want the words of a page rather than its look, this is exactly right; if you need the layout too, you need conversion, not cleaning.

There is also a surprise in the other direction: content hidden with CSS (warnings set to display:none, text placed for screen readers, unopened menu items) is invisible in the browser but present in the HTML. Because this tool does not interpret CSS, that text shows up in the output. In other words, the output is not a copy of what you saw on the page — it is the complete text the HTML actually contains.

Which setting for which job?

Both options are chosen by where the text is headed; the defaults cover the most common case.

• Archiving an article or newsletter as readable text → Keep paragraphs
• Pasting into a spreadsheet cell or a single-line field → Single line
• Dumping every link of a newsletter as a reference list → Text + URL
• Moving a clean body into a word processor → Keep paragraphs + link text only

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove HTML tags from text?

Just paste the HTML code into the left pane; the plain text with tags, script/style blocks and comments removed appears instantly on the right. You can copy the output or download it as a .txt file.

Is the HTML I paste sent to a server?

No. The cleanup runs entirely inside your browser; neither the code nor the text inside it is sent anywhere. You can safely paste an email body that contains customer details.

Why do characters like &amp; and &#231; come out fixed?

Those are HTML entities: the in-code spelling of special characters. The tool decodes every named entity defined in HTML — including accented ones such as &ccedil; and &eacute; — and all numeric ones into their real characters — &amp; becomes the ampersand, &#231; becomes ç. An entity it does not recognize is left untouched rather than mangled.

Does table data come out in columns?

No; the structure that aligns columns is built from tags and disappears with them, so cells drop onto separate lines. If you need the table as a table, you need format conversion rather than tag stripping — if you only need the text, this is the right tool.