Will stripping HTML remove all formatting including line breaks and paragraphs?

Depends on tool settings. With "Preserve Line Breaks" enabled, block elements ( , , , - ) are converted to line breaks, maintaining document structure. Lists ( , ) become indented text, headings get extra line breaks for emphasis. Without this option, all HTML is removed including structure, creating one continuous text block. For most uses, enable line break preservation to maintain readability. Inline formatting ( , , ) is always removed but doesn't affect structure. Tables can be converted to space-separated or tab-separated text. Choose based on use case: enable for readable output, disable when you truly need all formatting stripped (like for word counts where structure doesn't matter).

What happens to images, scripts, and CSS when stripping HTML?

By default, content inside and tags is completely removed (not shown in output) since it's not readable content. Images ( tags) are handled based on settings: remove entirely (default—no visible content), extract alt text (show descriptive text), or append image URLs for reference. Embedded CSS (style attributes, blocks) is removed. External resource links ( ) are removed. This ensures output is clean readable text without code. For content analysis, keeping alt text is useful (describes images for context). For data extraction where visual elements don't matter, remove images completely. Some advanced tools offer options to list all image URLs separately for inventory purposes.

How does the tool handle malformed or invalid HTML?

Most HTML stripping tools use lenient parsing that handles common HTML errors: unclosed tags (parser auto-closes them), improperly nested tags (parser reorders or ignores nesting issues), unquoted attributes, missing closing tags for void elements, and mixed HTML/text. The goal is extracting text content regardless of HTML validity—if a browser can display it, the stripper can process it. However, extremely malformed HTML (like missing opening tags, reversed tags like ) may produce unexpected results. For best results with problematic HTML: run through HTML validator first to identify issues, copy rendered text from browser instead of source (browser handles parsing), or use "view source" to get actual HTML being processed. Well-formed HTML always produces best stripping results.

Can I strip HTML from large documents or entire websites?

Individual tool page limits vary (typically handle megabytes of HTML), but for processing entire websites or very large documents: use command-line tools (html2text, Lynx -dump, Pandoc), programming libraries (BeautifulSoup in Python, Cheerio in Node.js, html-to-text npm package), or browser extensions that batch process. For websites: use wget or scraping tools to download pages, then batch strip HTML. For large CMS exports: use database queries to strip HTML during export, or write scripts for batch processing. Single-page HTML stripping tools work best for: individual articles (up to several MB), email templates, copied content snippets, and one-off conversions. For production systems regularly converting HTML to text, integrate stripping into application code rather than manual tool use.

Should I strip HTML before or after other text processing operations?

Generally strip HTML first, before other text operations, because: HTML entities ( , &) aren't recognized as spaces/characters until decoded, HTML tags artificially increase word counts and affect text analysis, searching/replacing becomes more complex with HTML present, and line break handling works better after HTML structure is converted to plain text breaks. Exception: if you need to preserve certain HTML for later processing (like extracting links with their surrounding context), do targeted operations before stripping. Typical workflow: 1) Strip HTML and decode entities, 2) Normalize whitespace, 3) Perform text analysis, cleaning, or transformation. For Markdown conversion, strip HTML, extract structure, then convert to Markdown (tools like Pandoc handle this workflow).

Strip HTML Tags

Remove all HTML tags from text and extract plain text content. Clean up HTML for plain text output.

HTML Input

Preserve line breaksDecode HTML entities

Plain Text Output

What It Does

Strip HTML Tags removes all HTML markup from text, extracting only the plain text content. This tool is essential for cleaning HTML content, converting web pages to plain text, extracting text from HTML emails, and preparing content for plain text formats. The tool preserves the text structure by optionally converting HTML line breaks to newlines and decoding HTML entities like & to their readable characters. Perfect for content migration, email processing, and text extraction from web sources.

Key Features:

Remove all HTML tags while preserving text content
Option to preserve line breaks from HTML structure
Decode HTML entities (e.g., & → &, < → <)
Clean up excessive whitespace automatically
Process large HTML documents efficiently
Maintain text readability and structure
Handle nested HTML tags correctly
One-click copy of cleaned text

How To Use

Extract plain text from HTML in three simple steps. Paste your HTML content, configure options, and get clean text output.

Paste HTML Content

Copy and paste your HTML code or content into the input area. The tool accepts any HTML format including full documents, snippets, or HTML emails.

Configure Options

Choose whether to preserve line breaks (converts <br>, <p>, <div> to newlines) and decode HTML entities (converts & to &, etc.). These options help maintain text structure and readability.

Copy Clean Text

The tool automatically processes your HTML and displays the extracted plain text. Use the copy button to copy the cleaned text to your clipboard.

Pro Tips

•Enable "Preserve Line Breaks" for better text structure
•Enable "Decode Entities" to convert & to & and similar
•Use this tool to extract text from HTML emails
•Perfect for cleaning content before pasting into plain text editors
•Useful for content migration from HTML to Markdown
•Can process large HTML documents efficiently

Benefits

Extract text from HTML without manual editing

Clean HTML content for plain text formats

Process HTML emails and web content quickly

Prepare content for Markdown conversion

Remove formatting while keeping text structure

Decode HTML entities automatically

Handle complex nested HTML structures

Maintain readability of extracted text

Use Cases

Email Content Extraction

Extract plain text from HTML emails to read content without formatting or to forward as plain text.

Extract text from HTML newsletter email

Content Migration

Convert HTML content to plain text before migrating to Markdown, plain text editors, or other formats.

Convert HTML blog post to Markdown format

Web Scraping Cleanup

Clean HTML content scraped from websites to extract only the readable text content.

Extract article text from scraped HTML

Code Documentation

Extract text from HTML documentation to create plain text versions or summaries.

Create plain text summary from HTML docs

Frequently Asked Questions

1 Does the tool preserve formatting like bold or italic?

No, the tool removes all HTML tags including formatting tags like <strong>, <em>, <b>, <i>. Only the text content is preserved. If you need to preserve some formatting, you would need a different tool that converts HTML to Markdown or another format.

2 What happens to HTML attributes and styles?

All HTML attributes, styles, classes, and IDs are completely removed. Only the text content within HTML tags is extracted. This ensures you get clean, plain text without any HTML markup.

3 Can I preserve line breaks from HTML?

Yes, enable the "Preserve Line Breaks" option. This converts HTML line break elements (<br>, <p>, <div>, etc.) to actual newlines in the output text, helping maintain the text structure and readability.

4 What are HTML entities and why decode them?

HTML entities are special codes like & (for &), < (for <), " (for "), and   (for non-breaking space). Decoding converts these back to their actual characters, making the text more readable. Enable "Decode Entities" to automatically convert them.

5 Does the tool work with JavaScript-rendered HTML?

The tool processes the HTML code you paste. If you need to extract text from a JavaScript-rendered page, you should first view the page source or use browser developer tools to copy the rendered HTML, then paste it into the tool.

6 Can I process very large HTML documents?

Yes, the tool can handle large HTML documents efficiently as all processing happens in your browser. However, extremely large documents (several megabytes) may take a moment to process. The tool works best with typical web page sizes.

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