Strip HTML Tags from Text

How to use the HTML tag remover

Paste HTML, from a full page source to a small snippet from a CMS or an email, and the plain text appears below as you type. Three options control the result:

• Line breaks for block elements keeps the structure readable. Paragraphs, headings, list items, table rows, <div> and <br> become line breaks, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Turn it off to get one continuous line of text.
• Decode entities turns &,   or é into the actual characters. Turn it off to keep the output HTML-safe: &, <, > and non-breaking spaces are then written as entities.
• Remove script and style content drops the code inside <script>, <style>, <noscript> and <template>, which is almost never wanted in plain text.

Whitespace is handled the way a browser renders it: runs of spaces and line breaks inside normal text collapse to a single space, while text inside <pre> keeps its formatting. Comments are always removed.

Why a real parser is safer than a regex

The classic shortcut html.replace(/<[^>]*>/g, "") fails on ordinary HTML. A > inside an attribute such as title="a > b" ends the "tag" too early, comments and CDATA leave fragments behind, and script content survives as text. This tool uses the browser's DOMParser to build a document tree, exactly as the browser would, and then reads out the text. A document created by DOMParser is inert: scripts do not run, event handlers such as onerror never fire and images or other resources are not loaded. The output is placed in a plain text box, so it is never interpreted as HTML.

Worked example

<h1>Release notes</h1>
<p>Version 2.1 is <b>faster</b> &amp; smaller.</p>
<ul><li>New export</li><li>Bug fixes</li></ul>
<script>track()</script>

becomes

Release notes

Version 2.1 is faster & smaller.

New export
Bug fixes

With line breaks turned off, the result is Release notes Version 2.1 is faster & smaller. New export Bug fixes.

Common uses

• Creating a plain-text version of an HTML newsletter.
• Cleaning text copied from a CMS or a WYSIWYG editor before pasting it elsewhere.
• Getting the word count of an article without markup, together with the word counter.
• Preparing page content for search snippets, meta descriptions or data analysis.

Common mistakes

• Using stripping as XSS protection. Removing tags for display is fine, but to accept user HTML on a site, use a dedicated sanitiser with an allow-list.
• Losing link targets. Only the visible link text is kept, not the href. Copy URLs separately if you need them.
• Images and alt text. Images are removed without their alt text, because it is not part of the visible text.