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HTML Stripper

Paste HTML and extract clean plain text in one click. Removes all tags, strips scripts and styles, optionally preserves paragraph breaks and decodes HTML entities.

Last updated: May 20, 2026

Client-Side Processing
Input Data Stays on Device
Instant Local Execution

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What is HTML Stripper?

Stripping HTML tags is one of the most common text-processing tasks in web development and content work. You might need plain text for a search index, an email notification, a text summary, a CMS field that only accepts plain text, or for cleaning up copy-pasted content from a webpage.

This tool removes all HTML tags from your input, including script blocks and style sheets which are dropped entirely along with their content. Block-level elements like paragraphs and divs can optionally be converted to newlines so the text structure is preserved. HTML entities like `&`, `<`, and ` ` are decoded back to their real characters so the output reads naturally.

How to Use HTML Stripper

1

Paste HTML into the input area or click "Load Sample"

2

Toggle options as needed: Preserve Line Breaks, Decode Entities, Collapse Whitespace

3

The output updates instantly as you type or change options

4

Copy the plain text or download it as a .txt file

Common Use Cases

  • Developers extracting plain text from HTML API responses or scraped web pages for indexing or storage.
  • Content teams cleaning up HTML-formatted copy pasted from a CMS into a plain text field or spreadsheet.
  • Email marketers generating plain-text fallback versions of HTML email templates.
  • Back-end engineers stripping user-submitted HTML before storing or displaying text.
  • Data engineers preparing HTML content for NLP pipelines or sentiment analysis tools.
  • SEO specialists extracting readable text from HTML for word count, keyword, or readability analysis.

Example Input and Output

An HTML article snippet is stripped to clean plain text with paragraph line breaks preserved.

HTML input
<article>
  <h1>Getting Started with APIs</h1>
  <p>An <strong>API</strong> (Application Programming Interface) lets two applications talk to each other.</p>
  <p>Common uses include fetching data, sending messages, and &amp; much more.</p>
  <ul>
    <li>REST APIs</li>
    <li>GraphQL</li>
  </ul>
</article>
Plain text output
Getting Started with APIs

An API (Application Programming Interface) lets two applications talk to each other.

Common uses include fetching data, sending messages, and & much more.

REST APIs
GraphQL

Privacy

All HTML stripping runs in your browser. No data is uploaded to any server.

Security note

This tool is for text extraction, not XSS sanitisation. If you need to safely render user HTML in a browser, use a dedicated sanitiser library like DOMPurify instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are script and style blocks removed too?
Yes. Script and style blocks are removed along with all their contents, not just the tags. This ensures JavaScript code and CSS rules do not appear in the plain text output.
What does "Preserve Line Breaks" do?
Block-level elements like <p>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, <li>, and <br> are converted to newline characters before the tags are stripped. This preserves the visual paragraph structure of the original content.
What HTML entities are decoded?
Common named entities (&amp; &lt; &gt; &quot; &nbsp; &copy; &mdash; etc.) and all numeric entities (&#123; or &#x7B;) are decoded back to their actual characters.
Is my HTML sent to a server?
No. All processing runs entirely in your browser. Your HTML never leaves your device.
Can this handle malformed or partial HTML?
Yes. The stripper uses regex-based tag removal rather than a strict DOM parser, so it works on fragments, partial documents, and slightly malformed markup.
What is the difference between HTML Stripper and HTML Cleaner?
HTML Stripper removes all tags and returns plain text. HTML Cleaner keeps valid HTML but removes unwanted attributes, inline styles, and unsafe elements — the result is still HTML, just tidier.

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