How to use the Strip HTML Tags
Strip HTML tags and extract plain text in three steps:
1
Paste your HTML
Paste any HTML content — a full page, a snippet, or just a fragment — into the input area.
2
Set options
Toggle 'Preserve line breaks from block elements' to insert newlines at p, div, h1–h6, li, and br tags, maintaining paragraph structure in the output. Toggle 'Collapse extra whitespace' to normalise spacing.
3
Convert and copy
Click 'Strip HTML Tags' and copy or download the plain text output. The input footer shows how many tags were detected.
When to use this tool
Use to extract readable plain text from HTML markup:
- →Extracting readable plain text from HTML email templates for creating plain-text fallback versions
- →Cleaning CMS-generated or WYSIWYG editor output for use in APIs and systems that reject HTML markup
- →Stripping HTML tags from scraped web content before feeding it into text analysis or NLP pipelines
- →Converting rich text editor output to clean plain text for storage in a plain-text database column
- →Processing HTML documentation files to extract content for indexing, search, or summarisation
- →Removing markup from HTML form submissions before displaying user-generated content in non-HTML contexts
Frequently asked questions
Q:Are HTML entities decoded in the output?
Yes — the tool decodes named entities (& → &, < → <, > → >, → space, — → —, © → ©, ® → ®, ™ → ™, … → …, € → €, and more than 20 others), as well as decimal numeric entities (© → ©) and hexadecimal numeric entities (© → ©). The decoded plain text is what you see in the output.
Q:What does 'Preserve line breaks from block elements' do?
When enabled, block-level HTML elements that normally create visual line breaks in a browser are converted to newline characters in the plain text output. The affected tags are: p, div, section, article, aside, header, footer, main, nav, li, dt, dd, blockquote, pre, h1–h6, tr, td, th, and br. This preserves the paragraph and list structure of the original document in the plain text.
Q:Is it safe to strip tags using a regex approach?
The tool uses a regex-based approach optimised for plain-text extraction from content HTML (emails, CMS output, scraped pages). For security-critical contexts — such as sanitising HTML before rendering it in a browser to prevent XSS attacks — a purpose-built HTML sanitiser library (like DOMPurify) should be used instead. This tool is designed for text extraction, not security sanitisation.
Q:Does it handle malformed or self-closing HTML?
Yes — the tag-stripping regex matches all well-formed and most malformed HTML tags including self-closing tags (like <br/>, <img/>), tags with attributes, and tags with unusual spacing. It removes any sequence matching <...> regardless of the tag name or attributes inside. Unclosed or malformed tags may leave residual angle brackets if they don't match the <...> pattern.
Q:Can I use this to extract text from a full HTML page?
Yes — paste the entire HTML source including <html>, <head>, <body>, and all their contents. The tool strips everything, including script and style blocks (though their text content will remain — to specifically remove script/style content, remove those blocks before stripping). The 'Preserve line breaks' option is especially useful for full-page extraction to maintain readable paragraph structure.
Q:Does it handle HTML from different sources like email clients and CMSs?
Yes — the tool works with HTML from any source: email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail), WordPress and other CMSs, WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, Quill, CKEditor), web scraping tools, and hand-written HTML. Email HTML in particular tends to be heavily nested with inline styles and table layouts, all of which are stripped to reveal the content text.