HTML to Text
Strip HTML tags and convert HTML documents to clean plain text. Supports link URLs, alt text, list bullets, entity decoding, and heading styles.
The HTML to Text converter is a free, browser-based tool that strips HTML markup and extracts clean, readable plain text from any HTML document or snippet. Paste your HTML, choose how headings, links, lists, and whitespace should be handled, and convert instantly. All processing happens in your browser — nothing is uploaded to any server.
Features
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Side-by-side editor | HTML input and plain text output displayed next to each other |
| File load | Open .html, .htm, or .txt files directly from your device |
| Show link URLs | Appends the href value after link text as [url] |
| Show image alt text | Replaces <img> tags with [Image: alt text] |
| List bullets | Prefixes <li> items with - for readable lists |
| Collapse whitespace | Removes extra spaces and tabs within each line |
| Decode HTML entities | Converts &, <, © and other entities to their characters |
| Heading styles | Format headings as underlined text (===), Markdown-style (##), or plain text |
| Table support | Converts <table> cells to tab-separated values |
| Stats bar | Shows input length, output length, word count, and line count |
| Copy to clipboard | Copy the plain text output with one click |
| Download .txt | Save the result as output.txt |
How to Use
- Paste your HTML markup into the HTML input area, or click Load to open a file.
- Choose your conversion options: link URL display, image alt text, list bullets, whitespace collapsing, entity decoding, and heading style.
- Click Convert to Text.
- Review the plain text result on the right side.
- Click Copy to copy to the clipboard, or Download to save
output.txt.
Conversion Options
Show Link URLs
When enabled, anchor tags are converted as Link text [https://example.com]. When disabled, only the visible link text is kept and the URL is discarded.
Show Image Alt Text
When enabled, <img> tags are replaced with [Image: alt text] using the image's alt attribute. When disabled, images are silently removed.
List Bullets
When enabled, each <li> item is prefixed with -. When disabled, list items appear as plain text without any bullet marker.
Collapse Whitespace
When enabled, multiple consecutive spaces and tab characters within a line are collapsed to a single space, and leading/trailing whitespace is trimmed from each line. This produces cleaner output from HTML that contains heavy indentation.
Decode HTML Entities
When enabled, HTML character references such as &, <, >, , and © are converted to their actual characters. Disable this if you want to keep the raw entity strings in the output.
Heading Styles
| Style | Example output |
|---|---|
| Underline (===) | Heading text followed by a line of === (h1) or --- (h2–h6) |
| Hash (##) | Markdown-style headings with # characters matching the heading level |
| Plain text | Heading text with no special formatting |
Use Cases
Content Extraction
Quickly extract readable text from web page source code, email HTML templates, or CMS-exported HTML files for analysis, word counting, or further processing.
Accessibility Review
Convert HTML pages to plain text to see what screen readers and text-based browsers will present to users, helping identify any content that is inaccessible when styles and images are removed.
Data Processing
Strip HTML formatting from database content, API responses, or scraped web data before further text analysis, sentiment detection, or natural language processing.
Email Template Review
Extract the plain-text version of HTML email templates for proofreading, or to prepare the plain-text alternative that well-formed emails should include alongside the HTML version.
SEO Content Audit
Extract body text from HTML pages to analyse keyword usage, heading hierarchy, link anchor text distribution, and overall text-to-HTML ratio.
Document Conversion
Convert simple HTML documents or reports to plain text as a fallback format for systems that do not support rich text or HTML.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the tool handle full HTML documents?
Yes. Paste a complete HTML document including <html>, <head>, and <body> tags. Script, style, head, and SVG elements are automatically ignored.
Are JavaScript and CSS included in the output?
No. <script>, <style>, <noscript>, and <head> elements are always stripped from the output regardless of settings.
How are tables converted?
Table rows are placed on separate lines. Cells within each row are separated by tab characters, making the output compatible with spreadsheet paste-in.
What happens to <pre> blocks?
The content of <pre> tags is preserved exactly as-is, including internal whitespace and line breaks, regardless of the collapse whitespace setting.
Can I convert very large HTML files?
Yes. Since all processing happens in the browser using the native DOM parser, there is no server-side file size limit. Very large files may take a moment depending on your device.
Why does the output have extra blank lines?
Multiple consecutive block-level elements each produce surrounding newlines. The converter automatically collapses three or more consecutive newlines down to two to keep the output tidy.