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Strip HTML Tags

Remove HTML tags and extract clean plain text with optional formatting controls.

About Strip HTML Tags

HTML markup is essential for web rendering but becomes unwanted noise the moment you need plain, readable text. Whether you are extracting article body copy from a scraped web page, cleaning up content exported from a CMS that stores HTML in a database column, removing formatting before pasting into a plain-text field, or preparing web content for natural language processing, Strip HTML Tags removes every HTML tag and returns clean plain text. Optional controls let you preserve line breaks from block elements like paragraphs and divs (so the text structure is maintained), decode HTML entities like & and   in the same pass, and collapse excess whitespace that tags leave behind. The result is immediately readable and paste-ready plain text.

Why use Strip HTML Tags

Removes All HTML Tags Completely

Every opening, closing, and self-closing tag is stripped — no partial tags or attribute fragments left behind.

Block Element Line Break Preservation

Convert <p>, <div>, <br>, and heading tags to newlines so paragraph structure survives stripping.

HTML Entity Decoding

Decode &, &nbsp;, <, >, and numeric entities to plain characters in the same pass.

Whitespace Collapse

Removes the chains of spaces that tags leave behind, producing clean single-spaced output.

CMS & Scraping Workflow Ready

Handles messy real-world HTML from CMSs, scrapers, and email clients that embed inline styles.

No Server Required

Runs entirely in the browser — confidential CMS content never leaves your machine.

How to use Strip HTML Tags

  1. Paste your HTML markup or HTML-containing text into the input area.
  2. Toggle 'Preserve line breaks' to convert block-level tags (<p>, <div>, <br>) to newlines.
  3. Toggle 'Decode HTML entities' to convert &, &nbsp;, < to their plain-text equivalents.
  4. Toggle 'Collapse whitespace' to remove excess spaces left by stripped tags.
  5. The plain text output appears instantly.
  6. Click Copy to copy the stripped text to your clipboard.

When to use Strip HTML Tags

  • When copying article text from a web page that pastes with HTML tags into your editor.
  • When cleaning CMS-exported content stored as HTML for import into a plain-text system.
  • When preparing web content for input into an NLP pipeline that expects raw plain text.
  • When stripping email HTML to read or process the plain-text message body.
  • When removing formatting tags from a Word-to-HTML conversion before pasting into a new document.
  • When extracting readable text from an HTML template for translation or content review.

Examples

Simple paragraph stripping

Input: <p>Hello <strong>world</strong>!</p>

Output: Hello world!

Full article with entities

Input: <h1>My Article</h1><p>Tom & Jerry is a classic.</p>

Output: My Article Tom & Jerry is a classic.

Email HTML snippet

Input: <div><p>Dear User,</p><p>Your account is ready.</p></div>

Output: Dear User, Your account is ready.

Tips

  • Enable all three toggles (preserve line breaks, decode entities, collapse whitespace) for the cleanest output from CMS-exported HTML.
  • For email HTML, the most important toggle is 'Preserve line breaks' — emails rely heavily on block elements for visual structure.
  • Run the output through Text Cleaner afterward to catch any remaining non-breaking spaces or zero-width characters that entity decoding may have introduced.
  • If you need the alt text from images, use Find & Replace to extract alt='...' values first, then strip the HTML.
  • For NLP or machine learning text prep, also use the Unicode Normalizer after stripping to normalize any accented characters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does it remove inline CSS and JavaScript as well as HTML tags?▾
Yes. <style> and <script> blocks are removed along with their content, and all inline style attributes are stripped with their tags.
What happens to HTML entities like &nbsp; after stripping?▾
With 'Decode HTML entities' enabled, &nbsp; becomes a regular space, & becomes &, and </> become < and >. Without this toggle, entities remain as their raw text representation.
Does it preserve the paragraph structure of the original HTML?▾
With 'Preserve line breaks' enabled, block-level elements like <p>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, and <br> are replaced with newlines before the tags are stripped, maintaining readable paragraph breaks.
Will it strip tags inside attribute values?▾
HTML inside attribute values (like alt text or title text) is not extracted — attributes are stripped along with their tags. Only the text nodes between tags are preserved.
Can I use it to strip tags from a full HTML page including <head>?▾
Yes. If you paste a full HTML document, the <head>, <script>, <style>, and all markup are stripped, leaving only the visible text content from the <body>.
Does it handle malformed or unclosed HTML tags?▾
The tool uses a regex-based approach rather than a DOM parser, so it handles many malformed patterns gracefully. Complex nested malformation may leave occasional artifacts — review the output for edge cases.
What is the difference between this and Strip Markdown?▾
Strip HTML removes HTML tags and their syntax. Strip Markdown removes Markdown formatting symbols like **, *, #, and []. Use the right tool for the markup language your input uses.
Does stripping tags remove image alt text?▾
By default, alt text in <img> tags is lost along with the tag. If preserving alt text is important, extract it manually using Find & Replace with a regex pattern before stripping.

Explore the category

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Glossary

HTML tag
A markup element in HTML consisting of an element name in angle brackets, such as <p> or <div>, used to define the structure and presentation of web content.
HTML entity
A code sequence starting with & and ending with ; representing a special character in HTML, such as & for &, &nbsp; for non-breaking space, and < for <.
Block element
An HTML element that creates a block of content that starts on a new line, such as <p>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, and <ul>. Contrasted with inline elements like <span> and <a>.
DOM (Document Object Model)
A tree-structured representation of an HTML document that browsers use to render pages and JavaScript uses to manipulate content.
Plain text
Text containing only printable characters and standard whitespace, with no markup, formatting codes, or binary data.
Inline style
CSS styles applied directly to an HTML element via the style attribute, such as <p style='color:red'>. Inline styles are stripped along with their tags.