HTML Stripper — strip tags, keep the text

How to use

1. Paste your HTML snippet into the left box, or click Sample to try an example.
2. The plain text result appears on the right immediately — there is no "Convert" button to wait for.
3. Adjust the checkboxes if you need different behavior: keep line breaks, remove scripts and styles, or drop link text.
4. Click Copy to grab the result, or Download .txt to save it as a file.
5. Click Clear to start over with an empty input.

What is an HTML stripper?

An HTML stripper is a tool that removes HTML tags from a piece of markup and returns only the human-readable text. It parses the input as a document, walks through every element, and collects the text nodes while discarding tags, attributes and hidden content. The result is plain text you can paste into a spreadsheet, an email, a database or an AI prompt without worrying about stray <div>s or inline styles.

People usually reach for a stripper after copying content from a web page, an HTML email or a rich-text editor. The clipboard keeps all the markup, and manual cleanup with find-and-replace is error-prone. A browser-based stripper handles the whole job in one paste, and because the parsing happens locally, sensitive content never leaves your machine.

Before and after

Input:

<div>
  <h2>Meeting notes</h2>
  <p>Launch is <b>Friday</b>. See <a href="/plan">the plan</a>.</p>
</div>

Output:

Meeting notes

Launch is Friday. See the plan.

Remove HTML tags in code instead

Prefer to do it in your own code? Here are the three most common approaches. The JavaScript version is the same technique this tool uses in your browser.

JavaScript (browser)

function stripHtml(html) {
  const doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
  doc.querySelectorAll('script, style, noscript').forEach(n => n.remove());
  return doc.body.textContent.trim();
}

// Node.js note: DOMParser is browser-only.
// In Node, use jsdom or a library like sanitize-html instead.

Python

import re

# Quick and dirty — fine for simple snippets:
text = re.sub(r'<[^>]+>', '', html)

# Recommended for real projects — handles malformed markup:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
text = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser').get_text()

PHP

// One-liner, but it does not decode HTML entities:
$text = strip_tags($html);

// Safer: decode entities first, then strip
$text = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($html));

When should you not strip tags?

Stripping destroys structure on purpose. If you need to keep the formatting, format or minify the markup instead of flattening it. Also remember that the result is plain text: entities such as & become &, and non-breaking spaces become regular spaces. That is usually what you want, but it matters when the exact characters are important.

FAQ

Related tool

References

• MDN — DOMParser
• WHATWG HTML Living Standard

Last updated: 2026-08-29