HTML to Text Converter — Free Online Tool | JsonFormatter
Strip all HTML tags and get clean plain text instantly. Paste any HTML and convert it to readable text with no markup, no scripts, no clutter.
Input
Plain Text Output
What Is an HTML to Text Converter?
Ever scraped a webpage and ended up with a wall of tags instead of readable content? Or copied text from a CMS export that came packed with <p>, <span>, and <div> tags? An HTML to text converter strips all that markup away and leaves you with clean, readable plain text. Under the hood, this tool uses the browser's DOM parser — specifically the textContent property — to extract only the visible text content from your HTML.
The conversion respects block-level elements: headings, paragraphs, list items, and table rows each become their own line, so the output stays readable. Script and style blocks are removed entirely before extraction, so you get actual content — not JavaScript code or CSS rules buried in the text. This is the same basic approach used by tools like Lynx, the text-based browser, and libraries like Mozilla Readability used in Firefox Reader View.
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. Click Sample to try it with an example.
Plain Text Appears Instantly
The right panel shows the extracted plain text as you type. Block-level elements produce line breaks so the output is naturally structured.
Copy or Download the Result
Click Copy to send the text to your clipboard, or Download to save it as a .txt file. For stripping tags with more control over what gets kept, try the HTML Stripper tool.
Example Conversion
Here is a typical piece of HTML content — the kind you might get from a CMS or web scrape. Paste it in to see the clean text output:
HTML input
When You Actually Need This
The most common use cases are web scraping cleanup (strip the tags after fetching a page), preparing content for search indexing, feeding HTML into LLMs or NLP pipelines that expect plain text, and extracting readable content from CMS exports or email newsletters. The Python html.parser module is often used for the same purpose in server-side scripts — this tool gives you the same result right in the browser.
If you need to sanitize HTML rather than strip it completely — keeping some safe tags but removing dangerous ones — check out the HTML Stripper tool instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it preserve formatting like bullet points and headings?
Headings, paragraphs, list items, and table rows each become their own line in the output. Bullet markers and heading labels are not added — you get the raw text content, just organized with line breaks where block elements were.
What happens to script and style tags?
Script and style elements are removed entirely before the text is extracted. You will never see JavaScript code or CSS rules in the output — only visible text content.
How is this different from just removing all < and > characters?
A naive regex-based approach (removing everything between < and >) can leave encoded entities like & or in the output. This tool uses the real DOM parser, so HTML entities are decoded properly — & becomes &, becomes a space, and so on. The innerText vs textContent difference on MDN explains more about how browsers extract text.
Is my HTML sent to any server?
No. Everything runs in your browser. The conversion uses the DOM API directly — no data is sent to any server. The W3C HTML spec defines how the text extraction works natively in every browser.
Can I convert very large HTML files?
Yes, within reason. The tool runs in your browser so the practical limit depends on your machine's memory. For very large files (multi-megabyte HTML exports), a server-side tool or the Python html.parser module may be faster.
Related Tools
Text extraction uses the DOM textContent and innerText APIs. The W3C HTML spec documents how innerText is defined. For Python-based extraction, see the html.parser docs.