HTML Tag Stripper — Free Online Tool | JsonFormatter
Strip HTML tags from any markup with toggleable options for scripts, styles, and line breaks. Get clean plain text from messy HTML instantly.
Input
Stripped Output
What Is an HTML Tag Stripper?
Sometimes you need the text from an HTML document but the markup is in the way. Maybe you pulled content from a CMS export, scraped a web page, or received an email newsletter packed with inline styles and tracking scripts. An HTML tag stripper removes all the markup and gives you clean, readable text. This tool uses the browser's native DOMParser to parse the HTML properly — no regex hacks that break on edge cases.
What makes this stripper different from a basic "HTML to text" tool is the control it gives you. Toggle buttons let you decide whether to keep line breaks (so block elements like paragraphs and headings produce natural spacing), remove <script> tags (to strip out tracking code and JavaScript), or remove <style> tags (to ditch embedded CSS). That flexibility is similar to what libraries like sanitize-html offer on the server side, but you get it right here in the browser without installing anything.
How to Use This Tool
Paste or Upload HTML
Paste your HTML into the left editor, or click Upload to load an HTML file from your computer. Hit Sample to try it with realistic example markup.
Toggle Your Options
Use the toggle buttons to control the stripping behavior. Line Breaks keeps natural spacing from block elements. Scripts removes <script> tags. Styles removes <style> tags. All three are on by default.
Copy or Download the Result
Click Copy to send the stripped text to your clipboard, or Download to save it as a .txt file. For a simpler one-click conversion without options, try the HTML to Text Converter.
Example Conversion
Here is a typical chunk of HTML with inline styles, a tracking script, and embedded CSS — the kind of markup you might get from an email newsletter or CMS export:
HTML with scripts, styles, and markup
When You Actually Need This
The most common scenarios: cleaning up web scraping output, preparing content for search indexing or NLP pipelines, stripping tracking scripts from email HTML, removing inline styles before importing content into a new CMS, and extracting readable text from legacy HTML pages. Server-side tools like DOMPurify and Bleach are great for sanitization in production code, but for quick one-off cleanup, this browser-based tool gets the job done instantly.
If you want to preserve some HTML structure while removing dangerous tags (like <script> for XSS prevention, as covered in the OWASP XSS cheat sheet), check out the HTML Escape tool instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do the toggle buttons do exactly?
Line Breaks inserts newlines after block-level elements (paragraphs, headings, list items, table rows, blockquotes) so the output reads naturally. Scripts removes all <script> elements before extracting text. Styles removes all <style> elements. When a toggle is active (dark), that behavior is enabled.
Does this tool sanitize HTML for security?
This tool strips tags to produce plain text — it is not an HTML sanitizer. If you need to allow some safe tags while removing dangerous ones (to prevent XSS), use a dedicated library like DOMPurify or sanitize-html. The OWASP XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet is a good starting point for understanding HTML sanitization.
How are HTML entities handled?
The browser's DOM parser decodes entities automatically. & becomes &, becomes a regular space, < becomes <, and so on. You get properly decoded text, not raw entity strings. This is defined in the W3C HTML parsing specification.
Is my HTML sent to any server?
No. The entire stripping process runs in your browser using the native DOM API. No data leaves your machine. You can verify this by checking the Network tab in your browser's DevTools — there are zero outbound requests when you paste or convert HTML.
What if I only want to remove some tags but keep others?
This tool strips all tags and returns plain text. If you need selective tag removal (keeping <p> and <a> but removing <script> and <iframe>), you need an HTML sanitizer. Libraries like sanitize-html let you define allowlists of tags and attributes.
Can I use this on very large HTML files?
Yes, within browser memory limits. The DOM parser handles large documents well, but if you are working with multi-megabyte files regularly, a server-side tool or a streaming parser will perform better. For Python projects, Bleach handles large documents efficiently.
Related Tools
Tag stripping uses the browser's native DOMParser and the textContent property. The W3C HTML parsing spec defines how browsers handle malformed markup. For production sanitization, see DOMPurify and sanitize-html.