Remove HTML Tags

The Remove HTML Tags tool strips all HTML markup from pasted content, leaving only the readable text. Drop in HTML source — a web page, an email body, an RSS feed item, an exported blog post — and get back the plain text with no <p>, no <a>, no <img>, no remaining markup. Perfect for cleaning content copied from a web page before pasting into a plain-text editor, extracting readable content from HTML emails for search indexing, or preparing text for analysis without markup noise.

This tool preserves the structure that matters. Paragraph breaks are kept (so <p>hello</p><p>world</p> becomes two lines, not one). List items become bulleted or numbered lines. HTML entities like &amp;, &nbsp;, and &quot; decode back to their literal characters. Optional modes let you strip only specific tags (just remove <script> and <style> while keeping formatting), or remove specific attributes while keeping tags. Every operation runs client-side so confidential content (internal documentation, customer emails, private reports) stays in your browser.

Stripping HTML tags is trivial as regex but correct HTML-to-plain conversion requires a real parser.

Regex approach: /<[^>]*>/g removes anything that looks like a tag. Works for simple HTML but breaks on edge cases — tags with > in attribute values (rare), HTML comments, CDATA sections, script blocks with JavaScript containing <. The regex is fast but not reliably correct on arbitrary HTML.

DOM parser approach: create a DOMParser, parse the HTML into a DOM tree, call textContent on the root. This handles all edge cases correctly because it uses the same parsing logic as the browser itself. The tool defaults to DOMParser for correctness, falling back to regex for speed on very large inputs.

Entity decoding: &amp; → &, &lt; → <, &gt; → >, &quot; → \", &apos; → ', &nbsp; → non-breaking space, &#65; → A, &#x41; → A. DOMParser handles all of these automatically; regex extraction needs an explicit decode pass.

Block vs inline tags: to preserve readable structure, block-level elements (<p>, <div>, <h1>-<h6>, <li>, <blockquote>) should produce line breaks in the output. Inline tags (<span>, <a>, <em>, <strong>) should not. The tool uses a standard block-element list to add newlines where appropriate.

<br> handling: always produces a line break in output.

List preservation: <ul> and <ol> items become bulleted or numbered lines. <ul><li>A</li><li>B</li></ul> becomes \"• A\n• B\" or \"- A\n- B\" depending on style.

Script and style removal: <script> and <style> blocks contain code, not readable text. Always remove them entirely, including content, before extracting text.

Comment removal: <!-- ... --> is never user-visible content, always stripped.

Whitespace normalization: raw HTML contains lots of whitespace (indentation, newlines in source) that does not affect rendered output. After text extraction, collapse multiple whitespace to single spaces by default, while preserving explicit paragraph breaks from block elements.

Compared to writing a custom tag stripper in code, this tool is faster for interactive use and handles edge cases (entities, scripts, malformed HTML) correctly out of the box. For automated pipelines, use a proper HTML sanitizer library like DOMPurify or Bleach.

Compared to HTML-to-Markdown conversion, this tool outputs plain text with no formatting preserved. Use the HTML to Markdown tool instead if you need to preserve headings, bold, and links as Markdown syntax.

Compared to pasting HTML into Word or Google Docs (which renders the formatting), this tool gives you the underlying text without any rich formatting — perfect for when you want the raw content stream.