HTML to Text Converter

Paste HTML and get clean plain text back: tags removed, scripts and styles dropped, entities such as & turned back into characters, and the paragraph breaks and list bullets kept so the result still reads properly. Useful for the plain text part of an email, a product feed, a word count or moving copy out of an old website.

What you enter

  • HTML
  • Keep link addresses

How it works

  1. Paste the HTML: a full page, a fragment from an editor or the source of an email.
  2. Script, style, head and comment blocks are removed first, so their code never leaks into the text.
  3. Paragraphs, headings and other blocks become line breaks, list items become lines starting with a dash, and entities are decoded.
  4. Tick 'Keep link addresses' to write each link as its text followed by the address in brackets, then copy or download the result.

Why stripping tags is harder than it looks

The quick approach of deleting everything between angle brackets leaves two problems. Text inside script and style tags survives as gibberish, and words from neighbouring blocks run together because the tags were the only thing separating them. A heading followed by a paragraph turns into one long line with no space between the last word of one and the first word of the next.

This converter works in a set order to avoid that: it removes whole blocks that are never shown, then marks where blocks begin and end with line breaks, then removes the remaining tags, decodes entities and finally tidies spaces and empty lines. The order matters; decoding entities first would turn '<p>' written as text into a real tag and remove it.

Plain text emails and feeds

Email programs that cannot show HTML fall back to the plain text part of a message, and some spam filters look at whether one exists and matches the HTML version. Generating it from the same HTML keeps the two versions in step. Keep link addresses on and check that the text still reads in order, since a layout built from tables can put a sidebar between two paragraphs.

Product feeds and marketplace listings often reject HTML in descriptions or show the tags as text. Converting the description first keeps the line breaks and bullets that make it readable while meeting the plain text rule.

Tips

  • For the plain text version of an HTML email, keep link addresses on. Readers of the text version have no other way to see where a button pointed.
  • Images disappear in plain text. If an image carried words, such as a banner with an offer, add those words to the HTML as real text before converting.
  • Tables become one line per row with cells separated by spaces, which is fine for reading but loses columns. Convert table data with a CSV tool instead.
  • If the output shows odd symbols like '&something;', that entity is not a common one. Search for it and replace it by hand; the rest of the text is unaffected.

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove HTML tags from text?

Paste the HTML in the box and the tags are removed as you type. Unlike a simple find-and-replace of everything between < and >, this converter also removes the contents of script and style blocks and turns block tags into line breaks, so '<p>One</p><p>Two</p>' becomes 'One', an empty line, then 'Two' instead of 'OneTwo'.

What happens to HTML entities?

Common named entities such as &amp;amp;, &amp;lt;, &amp;nbsp; and &amp;copy; and every numeric entity such as &amp;#169; or &amp;#xA9; are turned back into the characters they stand for. A non-breaking space becomes an ordinary space.

How are links handled?

By default only the link text is kept. With 'Keep link addresses' ticked, <a href="https://example.com">our site</a> becomes 'our site (https://example.com)'. If the link text is already the address, it is not repeated.

Is this safe for HTML I do not trust?

Yes. The HTML is treated as text and processed with patterns; it is never loaded into a page, so scripts inside it cannot run. Nothing is uploaded.

Will the result match what a browser shows?

Closely for ordinary content, but not exactly. A browser also applies CSS, which can hide elements or change line breaks. Hidden elements are still part of the HTML, so their text appears in the output.

Related: HTML to Markdown converter, Text to HTML converter, HTML viewer.

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