Convert HTML to plain text online
Paste HTML source and get clean plain text back — tags stripped, entities decoded, paragraphs and list items turned into readable line breaks. This tool uses the browser's own HTML parser (not regex tag-stripping, which breaks on nested or malformed markup), so it handles real-world HTML reliably. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
Parsed properly, not stripped with regex
The tempting way to remove HTML tags is a regular expression that deletes anything between angle brackets, and it breaks constantly — on attributes containing > characters, on unclosed tags, on script contents, on comments. This tool uses the browser's own HTML parser, the same one that renders pages, so it handles malformed and nested markup exactly as a browser would.
Structure becomes line breaks
Block elements are converted into meaningful whitespace rather than being silently dropped: paragraphs and headings become line breaks, list items get a leading dash, and br tags become newlines. Without that, extracting a page would produce one continuous wall of text with sentences running together. Script and style contents are removed entirely rather than appearing as stray code.
Entities decode automatically
Because a real parser is doing the work, HTML entities are resolved as a side effect — & becomes &, becomes a space, ' becomes an apostrophe. Regex-based strippers typically leave these intact, producing text littered with ampersand sequences that then need a second cleanup pass.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this remove script and style tags?
- Yes, script and style content is removed entirely rather than included as text.
- Are HTML entities like & decoded?
- Yes, since the browser's own parser handles entity decoding automatically as part of parsing the HTML.
- Is my HTML sent anywhere?
- No, parsing happens locally in your browser. Nothing is transmitted.
- Are tables preserved?
- Cell text is extracted but the grid structure is not, so table data comes through as sequential text rather than rows and columns.
- Does this work on a full web page?
- Yes. Paste the complete HTML source and scripts, styles, and markup are removed, leaving the readable text.