Strip HTML Tags

A strip HTML tags tool removes every element, attribute, and tag from a markup document and returns the plain text content that lived between them. The output keeps the human-readable copy while discarding the HTML syntax that surrounds it. The tool reads the input as HTML, walks the resulting DOM, and concatenates the text nodes in document order.

Content marketers, technical writers, data analysts, and anyone migrating content out of a CMS reach for this conversion when they need a clean text version of a page, a snippet, or a database column that holds rich HTML.

Why use a strip HTML tags tool?

• Migrate rich content into plain-text systems. Slack messages, SMS, and many CRMs accept only plain text. Stripping the HTML preserves the copy without the markup noise.
• Generate clean excerpts. Pulling the first 200 characters of a blog post for a meta description requires the source to be tag-free.
• Audit copy for SEO or readability tools. Most readability scorers expect raw prose, not HTML, so the strip step normalizes the input.
• Clean scraped data. Web scrapers return HTML by default; converting to plain text makes downstream analysis simpler.
• Stay local with proprietary copy. The tool runs in your browser, so unpublished posts and internal docs never leave your device.

How to use the Strip HTML Tags tool

1. Paste the HTML source into the HTML field on the left.
2. Read the cleaned plain text in the Plain text field on the right as you type.
3. Copy the output and paste it wherever a tag-free version is needed.
4. Replace the input to convert another snippet. The output updates immediately.

What gets stripped

The tool removes every HTML tag and attribute, including invisible elements like <script>, <style>, and <meta>. Whitespace between block elements is preserved as a single space or line break so the text reads naturally.

<!-- Input -->
<article>
  <h1>Quarterly results</h1>
  <p>Revenue grew <em>22%</em> year over year.</p>
</article>
 
<!-- Output -->
Quarterly results
Revenue grew 22% year over year.

Common use cases

• Newsletter and SMS pipelines. Marketers strip HTML from rich-text editor output before queuing a plain-text fallback.
• Search indexing. Indexers normalize content to plain text so the tokenizer ignores markup noise.
• CSV exports. Analysts strip HTML from CMS columns so spreadsheets render cleanly.
• Notification fallbacks. Email systems include a text/plain part that is the HTML body with tags removed.
• Content audits. Editors paste a page’s HTML into the stripper to count words or run a readability check on the actual prose.

Frequently asked questions

Does the tool keep links?

It keeps the anchor text but drops the href attribute. If you need to preserve URLs, copy them out separately before stripping, or paste the result into a tool that converts <a> to text (url).

Are scripts and styles removed?

Yes. The content inside <script> and <style> blocks is removed along with the tags, so executable code and CSS rules do not leak into the plain text.

Does stripping HTML sanitize untrusted input?

It removes tags, which prevents the most common XSS surface, but it is not a full sanitizer. For input that will be re-rendered as HTML, use a dedicated allow-list sanitizer; for input that will be rendered as text, stripping is sufficient.

What happens to entities like &?

They are decoded back to their original characters. & becomes &, < becomes <. If you need the entities preserved, use the HTML Escape / Unescape tool instead.

Will the tool preserve line breaks from <br> and <p>?

Yes. Block-level elements introduce a line break in the output so paragraphs and list items do not run together on one line.

Does it handle malformed HTML?

Mostly. The browser’s DOM parser is lenient and will recover from unclosed tags, mismatched attributes, and stray angle brackets. The output is the parser’s best interpretation, which usually matches what users actually see.

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• HTML Escape / Unescape: Convert <, >, &, and quotes to HTML entities and back.