Markdown to plain text
Strips Markdown syntax and leaves readable text.
Paste Markdown and press the button. Headings lose their hashes, bold and italic lose their asterisks, links keep their text, code loses its backticks, and what is left is the words.
The AI copy-paste problem
This has become the most common reason people need this tool. Assistants reply in Markdown, and when you copy that
reply into an email, a document, a form or a CMS that does not render Markdown, the reader sees
**important** and ### Heading as literal characters. It looks careless, and cleaning it by
hand across a long answer is tedious.
One press removes it all. The structure survives as line breaks and, if you want, bullet characters — so the text still reads as a list rather than collapsing into a paragraph.
What happens to each element
- Headings — the hashes go, the heading text stays on its own line.
- Bold, italic, bold-italic, strikethrough — markers removed, words kept.
- Links —
[text](url)becomestext, ortext (url)if you tick the option. Keep the URLs when the destination matters, drop them for prose. - Images — the alt text is kept and the image reference is dropped.
- Inline code and code blocks — backticks and fences removed, the code itself kept as text.
- Bullet lists — the marker becomes a bullet character by default, or nothing if you untick the option.
- Numbered lists — the numbering is removed. If you want to keep or rebuild it, the line numbering tool does that properly.
- Blockquotes — the angle bracket goes, the quoted text stays.
- Horizontal rules — removed entirely.
Runs of blank lines are collapsed so the result does not have large gaps where structure used to be.
Markdown or HTML?
If your text has <p> and <strong> tags rather than asterisks, that is HTML and
the HTML stripper is the right button — it is on this page too. Some text
contains both, in which case strip the HTML first and the Markdown second.
Doing it without this tool
Word and Google Docs: paste as plain text and the Markdown characters come with it, since they are ordinary text as far as the clipboard is concerned. Nothing removes them for you.
Command line: pandoc -f markdown -t plain file.md is the proper tool and handles tables and
footnotes as well.
Find and replace: possible with a handful of regular expressions, though nested emphasis and links with brackets inside them break naive patterns. Our multi-rule find and replace can hold the whole rule set if you want to customise the behaviour.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded — open DevTools, Network tab, and you will see zero requests while you use this tool.
How to use it
- Paste your Markdown into the box.
- Choose whether to keep link URLs and bullet characters.
- Press "Strip Markdown".
- Copy the plain text into your email, document or form.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
Because assistants reply in Markdown, where asterisks mean bold and italic. Anywhere that does not render Markdown shows them as literal characters. Stripping the formatting fixes it in one press.
Only if you tick the option, in which case the link becomes "text (url)". By default just the link text is kept, which reads better in prose.
The backticks and fence lines are removed and the code itself is kept as plain text, so nothing is lost.
Bullet lists keep a bullet character by default so the structure is still visible. Numbered lists lose their numbering — use the add line numbers tool if you want it back in a specific format.
Use the "Strip HTML instead" button. If the text contains both, strip the HTML first and then the Markdown.