HTML to Plain Text

Extract visible text from HTML. Script, style, and noscript blocks are skipped. Line breaks are added for block elements and <br>. Hidden elements (e.g. display:none) may still contribute text.

  • Runs entirely in your browser
  • No data stored or sent to a server
  • Free forever — no signup
  • Instant conversion

Input and Output

Use the interactive encoder and decoder on this page to process your text.

Learn more about HTML

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. Script, style, and noscript blocks are skipped. Line breaks are inserted for block elements and <br> tags.

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 add line breaks; hidden elements (display:none) may still contribute text
  • 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 script or style content included?

No. Content inside script, style, and noscript elements is skipped.

Can malformed HTML affect strip results?

Yes. Skipped blocks are removed with pattern matching before parsing. Pathological markup (unclosed tags, </script> inside strings) may not be handled perfectly.

Is this the same as HTML entity decoding?

No. Entity decoding converts &amp; codes; strip tags removes markup structure.