HTML to Text Converter
Strip HTML tags and extract plain text. Removes scripts, styles, and all markup instantly.
HTML Input
Plain Text
Why Convert HTML to Plain Text?
HTML is great for browsers but terrible for everything else. Email clients, databases, search indexes, accessibility tools, and analytics pipelines all need clean text without markup. Stripping HTML by hand is tedious and error-prone — miss one tag and your data is corrupted.
This converter uses the browser's built-in DOM parser to extract text content, which means it handles every edge case that regex-based strippers miss: nested tags, self-closing elements, HTML entities, and malformed markup. It also removes script and style blocks that would otherwise leak code into your text output.
Paste any HTML — a full page, a fragment, an email template — and get clean, readable plain text. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server.
What Gets Stripped vs Preserved
| Element | What Happens | Example |
|---|---|---|
| HTML tags | Completely removed | <p>Hello</p> becomes "Hello" |
| Script blocks | Removed including content | <script>alert(1)</script> becomes nothing |
| Style blocks | Removed including content | <style>.red{color:red}</style> becomes nothing |
| HTML entities | Decoded to characters | & becomes "&", < becomes < |
| Text content | Preserved | All visible text stays intact |
| Extra whitespace | Collapsed to single spaces | Multiple spaces/newlines become one space |
What this means for you: The output is clean, single-line text with no HTML artifacts. If you need paragraph breaks preserved, you'll want to add newlines manually or use a more sophisticated converter that handles block elements.
Common Use Cases
Email content extraction
HTML emails contain tables, inline styles, and tracking pixels. Stripping to plain text gives you the actual message content for logging, search indexing, or creating text-only email alternatives.
Database content cleanup
CMS platforms often store content as HTML. When migrating data or building search indexes, you need plain text. Stripping HTML ensures you're indexing actual words, not markup.
Accessibility testing
Viewing the plain text version of a page shows you what screen readers and text-only browsers see. If the text version doesn't make sense, your HTML structure needs work.
Content analysis
Word count tools, readability analyzers, and SEO checkers need plain text input. Converting HTML first ensures accurate measurements without tag names inflating the word count.
Why Not Use Regex to Strip HTML?
The classic regex approach — something like /<[^>]*>/g — fails in dozens of edge cases. It doesn't handle HTML entities, leaves script content behind, breaks on attributes containing >, and can't decode character references. HTML is not a regular language, and regular expressions can't reliably parse it.
This tool uses the browser's DOMParser API, which is the same HTML parser that renders web pages. It handles malformed HTML, decodes entities, and correctly identifies text nodes. It's more reliable than any regex pattern because it actually understands HTML structure.
Before and After Examples
Email template
<table><tr><td><h1 style="color:#333">Welcome!</h1><p>Thanks for <strong>signing up</strong>.</p></td></tr></table>
Welcome! Thanks for signing up.
Blog post with scripts
<script>trackPageView();</script><p>10 Tips for & Better SEO</p><style>.ad{display:block}</style>10 Tips for & Better SEO
Notice how script blocks, style blocks, and HTML entities are all handled correctly. The output is clean text with no artifacts.
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How to use this tool
Paste your HTML code into the input area
The plain text appears instantly in the output panel
Copy the cleaned text with the copy button
Common uses
- Extracting text content from HTML emails
- Cleaning CMS content for database migration
- Preparing text for readability analysis
- Stripping markup for search index preparation
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