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HTML to Text Converter

Paste HTML and get clean plain text with sensible line breaks, bullets and optional link addresses.

Processed locally in your browser

Options
0 chars · 0 lines
The result will appear here.

What is HTML to Text Converter?

Turning HTML into plain text is more than deleting tags: paragraphs need blank lines, list items need bullets, <br> needs a line break and scripts must not leak into the result. This converter reads the markup with a hand-written tokenizer and rebuilds readable text.

Links can be kept as "text (url)" so no address is lost, lists become "- item" lines, headings and blocks are separated by blank lines, table cells are separated by tabs and <pre> text keeps its spacing. Scripts, styles and comments are dropped, entities are decoded, and lines can be wrapped at a chosen width.

How does it work?

  1. Paste an HTML fragment or a full page into the input box.
  2. Choose whether links are kept as "text (url)", whether lists get bullets and whether image alt text is kept.
  3. Set a wrap width if you want lines broken automatically; 0 keeps paragraphs on one line.
  4. Copy or download the plain text.

Common use cases

  • Creating the text/plain part of an HTML e-mail.
  • Extracting the readable content of a saved page for notes or search indexing.
  • Converting a CMS export into plain text for a translator.
  • Getting a clean text version of an HTML snippet for a chat message or ticket.

Examples

Try this input in the tool above:

Input
<h1>Release notes</h1><p>Version <b>2.1</b> is out. Read the <a href="https://example.com/changelog">full changelog</a> &amp; upgrade guide.</p><ul><li>Faster search</li><li>New dark theme</li></ul><script>alert("dropped")</script>
Output
Release notes

Version 2.1 is out. Read the full changelog (https://example.com/changelog) & upgrade guide.

- Faster search
- New dark theme

Privacy

HTML to Text Converter runs entirely in your browser. The text or files you provide are processed on your device and are not uploaded, logged or stored on our servers.

Limitations

It reproduces structure with simple text conventions rather than rendering the page, so complex layouts, CSS-generated content and text hidden by styles are not interpreted.

Frequently asked questions

Is the HTML executed or displayed?

No. The markup is only tokenized as text. Nothing is rendered, no script runs and no external resource is loaded.

What happens to links and images?

With the link option on, <a href="https://…">docs</a> becomes "docs (https://…)". Anchors and javascript: links are skipped. Image alt text is kept only if you enable it, in brackets.

How are HTML entities handled?

A common set of named entities (&amp;, &eacute;, &copy;…) and all numeric entities are decoded, and non-breaking spaces become normal spaces.

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