This HTML to plain text tool is simple and intuitive. Here is a step-by-step guide:
Input HTML code: Paste or type the HTML code you want to convert into the left input box. The tool supports complete HTML document fragments, including complex HTML with inline styles and script tags. You can copy page source code, email HTML content, or any other HTML-formatted text directly into the tool.
Configure conversion options: The tool provides 8 flexible format preservation options. You can check or uncheck different options as needed. For example, if you only need completely clean plain text, uncheck all format options. If you want to keep link information, check the Keep links option, and the tool will convert <a> tags to "text (URL)" format.
Run conversion: Click the Convert button, and the tool will parse the HTML locally in your browser and generate plain text. The result appears in the output area below, along with character count, line count, and word count statistics. You can copy the result or download it as a .txt file.
The HTML to plain text converter has a wide range of practical applications in daily work and development. Here are several typical use cases:
Clean up email content: HTML-formatted emails often contain numerous style tags and table layouts. Use this tool to quickly convert email content into clean plain text, making it easier to read and edit in note-taking apps, chat tools, or plain text editors.
Extract web page content: Content copied from web pages often carries rich text formatting. Paste the HTML code into the tool, convert it to plain text in one click, and then import it into Markdown editors, Word documents, or other content management systems without formatting issues.
Data preprocessing: In data analysis and natural language processing projects, raw HTML data often needs to be cleaned into plain text. This tool can batch-process HTML documents, quickly remove tags and decode entities, providing clean data input for subsequent text analysis and machine learning model training.
HTML vs Plain Text: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a markup language that describes the structure and style of documents through tags. Plain text, on the other hand, contains no formatting markup whatsoever. HTML documents render with rich visual effects in browsers, but in certain scenarios (such as code comments, database fields, API responses), we only need the plain text content.
HTML Entity Encoding: To display special characters (such as <, >, &, ©, etc.) in HTML, browsers use entity encoding. For example, < represents <, and & represents &. The tool provides an entity decoding option to convert these encodings back to their original characters.
DOM Parsing vs Regex: This tool uses the browser's native DOM parser to parse HTML, rather than simple regex matching. DOM parsing correctly handles nested tags, self-closing tags, comments, and other complex cases, ensuring accurate conversion results. Regex is prone to errors with complex HTML and is not recommended for HTML parsing tasks.
Not necessarily. The tool offers multiple format preservation options, including converting headings to Markdown style, keeping links as text+URL format, converting lists to bulleted lists, and more. You can also choose to strip all formatting and get completely clean plain text.
Yes. The tool runs entirely in your browser locally. Processing speed depends on your device performance. Typically, HTML documents of several megabytes can be converted within seconds.
Yes. After conversion, you can click the download button to save the result as a .txt file, or copy it directly to your clipboard to paste into other applications.
Absolutely. The tool uses UTF-8 encoding and fully supports HTML documents containing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Emoji, Arabic, and all other Unicode characters.
Yes. The tool automatically decodes common HTML entities (such as , <, >, &, etc.) into their corresponding characters. You can also disable this feature if needed.
No. All conversion operations are performed locally in your browser. Your HTML code never leaves your device, ensuring 100% data privacy.