Use the free Strip HTML Tags from Text below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
Why HTML ends up in your text
You copy a paragraph from a web page and paste it into a document, and along come the tags: angle brackets, divs, spans, classes and links you never wanted. You export content from a website or an email template and get a file full of markup instead of words. You scrape a page for research and end up with code mixed into your notes. In all of these cases the words are there, but they are buried inside HTML.
Removing tags by hand is slow and risky. A page can have hundreds of tags, and deleting them one by one invites mistakes: a deleted bracket here, a missing word there. A quick find-and-replace with a simple pattern looks tempting, but it has traps of its own. A naive pattern can eat text that merely looks like a tag, break on nested tags, or leave behind entities like & that should have become a plain & character.
Why reading the document beats matching patterns
This tool takes a safer route. Instead of guessing with a pattern, it loads your HTML into the browser’s own document parser and reads the text back out. The browser already knows how HTML works: which tags nest, which attributes belong where, and how entities decode. That means nested tags come out clean, attributes disappear with their tags, and & becomes & without any extra step.
The difference shows up in messy real-world HTML. A page copied from a content editor often has spans inside spans, empty tags, and formatting left over from several rounds of editing. A pattern-based stripper can leave fragments behind or swallow a chunk of real text. The document-based approach treats the input the way a browser treats a page, so the text that comes out is the text a reader would actually see.
How to use this tool
Paste your HTML into the box and press the button. By default, line breaks and paragraphs become real new lines, so the structure of the original survives: headings, paragraphs and list items stay on separate lines instead of collapsing into one wall of text. If you want a single flowing block, uncheck that option. A second option collapses runs of spaces into one, which tidies up the extra gaps that indented HTML often leaves behind.
The result is plain text you can paste anywhere: a document, an email, a note, a spreadsheet cell, a social post. Nothing is uploaded and nothing leaves your browser, which matters when the text is private or under embargo. The tool also reports how many characters went in and came out, so you can see at a glance how much markup was removed.
When stripping tags is not enough
Plain text has limits. Stripping tags removes links, so a linked phrase keeps its words but loses its destination. It removes images entirely, including their alt text in some cases, so a picture-heavy page may come out thinner than you expect. It also removes tables’ structure, leaving the cell contents in reading order rather than in rows and columns. If you need a table or the links, export the content in a richer format instead.
For everything else, a clean strip is exactly what you need: readable words, no code, no clutter. Whether you are cleaning copied content, preparing text for analysis, or rescuing words from a broken export, the fastest route is to let the browser do the parsing and hand you back just the text.
One more everyday use is email. Newsletters and marketing emails are built with HTML tables and inline styles, and copying them into a plain-text note or a ticket usually drags the markup along. Stripping it first gives you the message exactly as a reader sees it, without the code that built the layout. The same applies to content copied from word processors that export messy HTML behind the scenes.
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