HTML to Text Converter

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

What this means for you: By default the output is clean, single-line text with no HTML artifacts. If you need paragraph breaks kept, turn on the "Preserve line breaks" toggle above the input and block elements become real line breaks.

Two Output Modes

The toggle above the input lets you pick how structure is handled. Both modes strip every tag, script, and style; the difference is what happens at paragraph and list boundaries.

<h1>Title</h1>
<p>Line one</p>
<p>Line two</p>

Title Line one Line two

Title
Line one
Line two

Common Use Cases

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. Regular expressions cannot do this reliably because HTML is not a regular language, which is why a real parser is the right tool for the job.

Before and After Examples

<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.

<script>trackPageView();</script><p>10 Tips for &amp; 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.

Tips for Reliable Extraction

• Hidden text still comes through. Text content is read from the DOM, not the rendered layout, so words inside elements hidden with CSS (such as display:none) are still extracted. Remove hidden sections first if you only want what a reader sees.
• Attribute text is never included. Values in alt, title, placeholder, and meta tags are attributes, not text nodes, so they will not appear in the output. That is usually what you want, but worth knowing if a label seems to be missing.
• Tables flatten in reading order. Cell text is extracted left to right, top to bottom. With preserve mode each row ends on its own line, but columns are not aligned into a grid.
• Paste only the part you need. Full pages can produce very long output. Trimming to the article or message you care about keeps the result focused and quicker to scan.

Handling Whitespace and Encoding

Two details trip people up most often: whitespace and character encoding. Knowing how each is treated saves a lot of confusion when the output does not look the way you expected.

• Runs of whitespace collapse. The newlines, tabs, and indentation that make source HTML readable are not content, so they are reduced to single spaces. This is exactly how a browser renders text, where layout comes from CSS rather than the source spacing.
• Non-breaking spaces become normal spaces. The   entity is decoded to a space, so text that used it for spacing reads naturally instead of carrying an invisible special character.
• Accents and emoji are kept. The parser works in Unicode, so accented letters, currency symbols, and emoji survive intact. Numeric and named character references such as é resolve to their real character.
• Preserve mode keeps structure, not spacing. Turning the toggle on adds line breaks at block boundaries, but it still collapses the incidental whitespace inside each block, so you get tidy lines rather than the original indentation.

Stripping HTML in Code

If you need this as part of a script rather than a one-off paste, every environment has a sensible approach. The browser and Node.js differ because Node has no built-in DOM, so a small library does the parsing there.

A word of caution on strip_tags: it removes tags but leaves the text inside script and style blocks, and it does not decode HTML entities. For anything beyond trusted, simple markup, a real parser like the ones above is safer.

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