How to Strip HTML Tags to Plain Text
HTML to Text
When to Strip HTML
Extract readable text from email HTML, scraped pages, or CMS exports before diffing, indexing, or feeding content into plain-text pipelines. Removes tags while preserving visible text content.
What Is Preserved
Text nodes are concatenated in document order. Scripts and styles are not executed — the browser parses markup locally and returns textContent for debugging and cleanup workflows.
Developer Tips
- Block-level tags may collapse whitespace — normalize if you need paragraph breaks
- For structured extraction prefer dedicated parsers when you need tables or lists preserved
- Sanitize untrusted HTML before processing in production systems
Frequently asked questions
Does this preserve links?
Link text is kept but URLs in attributes are not included unless visible as text.
Is this the same as HTML entity decoding?
No. Entity decoding converts & codes; strip tags removes markup structure.