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HTML to Plain Text online

Strip HTML tags and convert HTML to clean plain text

HTML to Plain Text Converter logo
by
CHUNKY
MUNSTER
// HTML input
// Plain text output

How to Use the HTML to Plain Text Converter

  1. Paste your HTML — page source, an email template, or scraped markup — into the input.
  2. Tick or untick the option toggles: Preserve line breaks, Keep link text, Decode entities.
  3. Watch the plain text output update live as you change options.
  4. Copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

HTML carries a lot of noise — tags, classes, inline styles, scripts — when all you want is the readable content. This converter parses your input through the browser's own DOM, walks the tree to extract visible text, and decodes entities like  , © and ’ into the characters they actually represent. Block-level tags become real line breaks so paragraphs survive the conversion.

How the HTML to Text Converter Works

The HTML is loaded into a temporary DOM node so the browser does the heavy lifting — entities decode automatically, malformed markup is forgiven, and textContent returns the visible text without tags. Before extraction, block-level openers (<br>, <p>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, <li>, <tr>) are replaced with newline characters so paragraph breaks survive. Runs of three or more newlines are collapsed to two for readability.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will it keep paragraph breaks from the original HTML?

Yes — leave "Preserve line breaks" ticked and the converter inserts real newlines wherever it finds <br>, <p>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, <li> or <tr>. Untick the option to flatten everything into a single line.

What happens to link URLs?

By default the visible link text is kept and the URL is dropped — that's usually what you want for reading. Untick "Keep link text" to remove anchors entirely. The tool doesn't append URLs in brackets like some converters do.

Does it decode HTML entities like &nbsp; and &rsquo;?

Yes — the converter parses the HTML using the browser's own DOM, so all named entities (&copy;, &mdash;, &nbsp;) and numeric entities (&#8217;) are decoded into their actual characters automatically when "Decode entities" is ticked.

Can I extract text from a whole web page I copied?

Yes — paste the page source (View Source in your browser, then copy). Scripts, styles and HTML comments are stripped along with the tags, so the output is just the visible content. <pre> and <code> contents are kept verbatim.

Pair with the HTML Minifier, the Markdown to HTML Converter, or the Word Counter for follow-up text work.