HTML to Text Converter
Strip HTML tags and turn markup into clean, readable plain text. Paste or upload HTML, fine-tune how links, images, and line breaks are handled, and copy or download the result — all in your browser.
100% Client-Side Processing
Your HTML is parsed and converted entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server.
Options
Insert a line break after block-level elements like paragraphs, headings, and list items. Turn off to collapse everything into a single line.
HTML preview
For safety, <script> tags are removed before conversion and never executed.
Table of Contents
What is an HTML to Text Converter?
An HTML to Text converter strips away tags, attributes, and styling from HTML markup and leaves behind the readable text content — the same words a browser would show a user, without any of the code around them.
It is useful whenever you need clean, portable text from a web page, email template, or CMS export: for search indexing, spam filtering, text analysis, accessibility checks, or simply pasting content into a plain-text document without formatting artifacts.
How it Works
- Add your HTML: Paste HTML directly, or upload an .html file.
- Choose your options: Decide whether to preserve line breaks, include link URLs, keep image alt text, and collapse extra blank lines.
- Preview and read the result: The tool parses your markup in your browser and shows the extracted plain text instantly, alongside a rendered preview of the original HTML.
- Copy or download: Copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
Features
- Paste HTML or upload an .html file
- Instant, live conversion as you type — no button to click
- Optional line breaks after paragraphs, headings, and list items
- Optional link URLs appended after link text
- Optional image alt text included as [bracketed] placeholders
- Collapses excessive blank lines for cleaner output
- Live word and character counts
- Copy to clipboard or download as .txt
- 100% client-side processing for privacy
Best Practices
- Keep line breaks on for readability: Preserving line breaks after paragraphs and headings keeps the output easy to scan, especially for longer documents.
- Turn line breaks off for search or diffing: A single-line output is often easier to feed into search indexes, spam filters, or text-diff tools.
- Include link URLs when the destination matters: Enable this option when you need to preserve where links point, such as archiving an email or article.
- Drop image alt text for pure prose: Turn this off if bracketed image placeholders clutter the output for your use case.
- Check the rendered preview first: Use the HTML preview to confirm the markup renders as expected before relying on the extracted text.
- Tidy up source HTML first: Minified or deeply nested markup still converts correctly, but cleaner HTML makes the output easier to predict.
Troubleshooting
The output text looks jumbled or out of order
Deeply nested tables or CSS-based layouts (like flexbox or grid with reordering) do not translate their visual order to the text extraction, which follows the HTML source order.
Links appear without their URLs
Enable "Include link URLs" in Options to append each link's destination in parentheses after the link text.
Everything is on one line
Turn on "Preserve line breaks" so paragraphs, headings, and list items each start on a new line.
There are too many blank lines between sections
Enable "Collapse extra blank lines" to reduce runs of empty lines down to a single blank line.
Special characters look wrong
HTML entities like & or are decoded automatically. If characters still look wrong, check that your source HTML declares the correct character encoding.
Common Use Cases
- Content migration: Extract clean text from old web pages or CMS exports before importing them into a new system.
- Email and newsletter archiving: Convert HTML emails into plain text for text-only backups or spam-filter testing.
- SEO and content audits: Pull the visible text from a page to check word count, keyword usage, or duplicate content.
- Accessibility and screen-reader testing: Compare the extracted text against what a screen reader would announce.
- Feeding text into other tools: Prepare clean input for search indexing, translation tools, or language models that expect plain text, not markup.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Your HTML is parsed and converted entirely in your browser and is never uploaded to a server.
No. <script> tags are removed before conversion, and the HTML is never executed as a live page.
No. The output is plain text with no formatting — bold, italics, colors, and other styling are all stripped.
Images themselves are not included in plain text. If "Include image alt text" is enabled, each image's alt attribute is shown as a bracketed placeholder.
Yes. All named and numeric HTML entities are automatically decoded into their corresponding characters.
You can paste a complete HTML document (with <html>, <head>, and <body>) or a smaller HTML fragment. Both are supported.
Yes. Table cells are separated so the text stays readable, though complex table layouts may not preserve perfect column alignment in plain text.
No. Everything happens locally in your browser, and nothing is uploaded or saved.