Remove HTML tags
Turns HTML into plain readable text, dropping scripts, styles and markup.
Paste HTML — a source view, an email body, an export from a CMS — and press the button. You get the text a reader would see, without the markup.
Not a regular expression
The usual approach is to delete everything between angle brackets with a pattern. It half works, and the half that
does not causes real problems. The contents of <script> and <style> blocks are
not tags, so they survive — meaning your "plain text" contains JavaScript and CSS rules. HTML entities like
& and stay in their encoded form. An angle bracket inside an attribute
value throws the whole thing off.
This tool parses the HTML the way a browser does and takes the resulting text. Entities are decoded to real characters, script and style contents are dropped before parsing, and structure is preserved as line breaks rather than everything collapsing into one paragraph.
The parsing is done in an isolated element that is never attached to the page, so nothing in your HTML can run. Scripts and event handlers are discarded rather than executed, and no external resources are requested — worth knowing if you are pasting HTML from a source you do not fully trust.
Uses
- Getting text out of an email. HTML mail viewed as source, or forwarded as raw markup.
- CMS and export migration. Content stored as HTML that has to become plain text for a new system.
- Word counting. Counting the words in an HTML page without counting the markup. Follow with the word counter for the real figure.
- Reading a scraped page. Turning saved source into something you can actually read.
- Cleaning pasted content. Text copied from a web page that brought its formatting along.
Markdown, not HTML?
If your text is full of **bold**, # headings and [links](url) rather than
tags, that is Markdown — the format most AI assistants reply in — and the second button handles it. It removes the
formatting characters while keeping the words, and optionally keeps the URLs from links in brackets. Running the HTML
stripper on Markdown does nothing, since there are no tags to remove.
Doing it without this tool
Word: paste as unformatted text (Ctrl+Shift+V). Works for rendered content copied from a browser, not for raw source.
Excel: nothing built in. SUBSTITUTE chains cannot express "anything between angle brackets".
Notepad++: Find & Replace in regex mode with <[^>]*> — the classic approach, with
all the script, style and entity problems described above.
Command line: lynx -dump -stdin or pandoc -f html -t plain, both of which parse
properly and produce good results if they are installed.
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 HTML into the box.
- Press "Strip HTML tags".
- If your text uses Markdown rather than tags, press "Strip Markdown instead".
- Copy the plain text or download it.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Script and style blocks are dropped entirely before parsing, so their contents do not end up in your text — which is the main failure of the usual regular expression approach.
Yes. &amp; becomes &, &nbsp; becomes a space, and named and numeric entities are converted to the characters they represent.
Yes. Parsing happens in an element that is never added to the page, so scripts and event handlers are discarded rather than run, and no external resources are requested.
Block-level structure is preserved as line breaks so the result stays readable, and runs of blank lines are collapsed rather than left as large gaps.
Use the "Strip Markdown instead" button. It removes heading marks, emphasis, code ticks and link syntax while keeping the words.