HTML to Plain Text

How to use

1. 1Paste your HTML source into the left panel. Page source, email HTML, CMS exports, and code blocks all work.
2. 2Pick a quick preset (Readable, Keep link URLs, Single line, Structured doc) for the most common jobs, or fine-tune options below.
3. 3Toggle Include link URLs to keep hrefs in brackets, or Include image alt text to surface alt labels as [alt].
4. 4Read the cleaned plain text on the right, with live word, line, and character counts plus how many markup characters were removed.
5. 5Click Copy plain text to grab the result, or Replace with plain text to load the output back into the input for another pass.

About this tool

HTML to Plain Text strips every tag from a chunk of HTML and returns clean readable plain text, exactly the way a human would read it after the markup is gone. Paste a full page of HTML, an email source, a fragment from a CMS, a Confluence export, or a piece of generated markup, and the converted text appears live on the right as you type. The tool parses your input with the browser's native DOMParser, walks the document tree, and writes a clean string to the output panel. Inline tags such as span, strong, em, and code disappear and leave only their text. Block tags such as p, div, section, article, blockquote, h1 through h6, table rows, and list items introduce a single line break or a blank line so paragraphs and bullets stay readable. Lists become real bullets (- ) for unordered lists and numbered prefixes (1. , 2. , ...) for ordered lists, with indentation that reflects nesting. Anchors keep their visible text and can optionally append the href in brackets so URLs survive the conversion (handy for converting marketing emails, newsletters, or rich documents into review-ready plain text). Images can optionally render as [alt text] so accessibility labels are preserved. Headings can be uppercased so they still stand out in pure text. HTML entities (named entries like " and  , decimal references like ™, and hex references like —) are decoded automatically. Scripts, styles, noscript blocks, templates, iframes, embeds, SVG markup, and canvas content are dropped entirely, so the output never contains executable code or stray CSS. Quick presets cover the four most common jobs in one click (Readable plain text, Keep link URLs, Single line, Structured doc with uppercase headings), and toggles let you fine-tune whether to preserve line breaks, collapse whitespace, include image alt text, or trim leading and trailing whitespace from the result. Useful for marketers and copywriters cleaning up rich-text pastes from a CMS, support agents extracting message bodies from HTML emails, developers verifying what an HTML template renders as text, SEO teams checking the actual reading content of a page, accessibility auditors reading the textual content without visual styling, screen-reader testers, anyone copying a forum thread into a plain-text doc, and writers who need to remove the formatting noise that pasted HTML drags into Word or Notes. Everything runs locally in your browser; the parsed HTML is detached from the live page, so any scripts inside it are inert and never execute, and the input is never uploaded to a server.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.