Why not just strip the tags with a regex?

Because tags are where the line breaks live. Removing ` `…` ` leaves the heading touching the next sentence, and removing ` ` turns a list into one long line. A regex also cannot tell content from ` ` and ` `, so page code ends up in your text — and it will happily mangle a `<` that was meant literally.

What happens to tables?

Each row becomes a line and each cell is separated by a tab, so you can paste the result straight into Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and get columns rather than one crowded cell. If you want a Markdown table instead, use the HTML table to Markdown converter.

Does it keep code formatting?

Yes. Whitespace inside ` ` is preserved exactly, because there the indentation and line breaks are the content. Everywhere else runs of spaces and newlines collapse, which is what a browser does too — otherwise the source file’s indentation would come through as ragged text.

An image contributes its `alt` text if it has any, and nothing if it does not. That matters more than it sounds: in a report the alt text is often the only description of a chart, and dropping it silently loses the finding.

Does the text ever leave my browser?

No. The conversion uses the browser’s own HTML parser, so the markup you paste — and the text extracted from it — stay on your machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.

HTML to text converter

Q: What happens to tables?

Each row becomes a line and each cell is separated by a tab, so you can paste the result straight into Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and get columns rather than one crowded cell. If you want a Markdown table instead, use the HTML table to Markdown converter.

Q: Does it keep code formatting?

Yes. Whitespace inside ` ` is preserved exactly, because there the indentation and line breaks are the content. Everywhere else runs of spaces and newlines collapse, which is what a browser does too — otherwise the source file’s indentation would come through as ragged text.

Q: What about images?

An image contributes its `alt` text if it has any, and nothing if it does not. That matters more than it sounds: in a report the alt text is often the only description of a chart, and dropping it silently loses the finding.

Q: Does the text ever leave my browser?

No. The conversion uses the browser’s own HTML parser, so the markup you paste — and the text extracted from it — stay on your machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.

Strip the tags and keep the reading. Paste HTML and get plain text with its paragraphs, lists and tables still intact.

Get readable plain text — paragraphs, lists and tables kept. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded.

HTML

Plain text appears here

Converted — share it as a page.

Publish this as a live page in one click. No account to start.

Most "HTML to text" tools do the same thing a browser does when you select-all and copy: they take every text node and glue it together. That is why the result so often reads as Q3 summaryRevenue is up — the words either side of a heading fused, because nothing marked where the block ended. This converter walks the document instead, and puts the line breaks back where the markup said they belong: a blank line between paragraphs, one line per list item, a tab between table cells so a copied table still pastes into a spreadsheet as columns. Code inside <pre> keeps its indentation, because there the whitespace is the content. <script> and <style> are dropped, so you get the page’s prose and not its CSS. Everything runs in your browser — the HTML never leaves your machine.

How HTML to text works

1. Paste your HTML — a saved page, an email source, or a fragment — into the box above. You can also upload an `.html` file.
2. The right pane shows the plain text, with paragraph breaks, list items, table columns and code indentation preserved.
3. Copy it, download it as a `.txt`, or publish the original page at a shareable link.

A real example

A support lead needs the text of forty archived help-centre articles to load into a new knowledge base. The export is raw HTML: each article has a heading, a few paragraphs, a bulleted list of steps, one parameters table, and a code snippet showing a curl call. Their first attempt was a regex that removed anything between angle brackets. It ran, produced text, and looked plausible — until they read it: every heading was welded to the sentence after it, all nine bullet points had become one run-on line, the table was a single string of numbers with no way to tell a region from a revenue figure, and the curl command had lost the line continuations that made it runnable. Pasting the same HTML here returns the article as it reads: the heading on its own line, the steps one per line, the table as tab-separated columns that drop straight into a sheet, and the curl snippet still copy-pasteable. The <style> block at the top of every article, which the regex had turned into a paragraph of CSS, is simply gone.

Questions about HTML to text

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Related use cases

How HTML to text works

1. Paste your HTML — a saved page, an email source, or a fragment — into the box above. You can also upload an `.html` file.

2. The right pane shows the plain text, with paragraph breaks, list items, table columns and code indentation preserved.

3. Copy it, download it as a `.txt`, or publish the original page at a shareable link.

A real example