HTML to Text Converter

What HTML-to-text conversion actually does

Web pages, emails, and CMS exports are not plain text. They are HTML: a tree of tags such as p, div, span, a, and strong wrapped around the words you actually care about. When you copy that source or paste a rich snippet, you carry along inline styles, tracking attributes, and structural markup that get in the way the moment you want the readable content on its own. Converting HTML to text walks that tree and keeps only the visible words, discarding every tag and attribute.

The goal is not just deleting angle brackets. A naive search-and-replace of tags would smash paragraphs together and turn a tidy article into one unbroken wall. A proper conversion treats block-level elements such as paragraphs, headings, and list items as boundaries, inserting line breaks so the output reads in the same logical order a human would, while inline elements such as bold and italics simply vanish and leave their text behind.

What you keep and what you lose

By design, plain text cannot hold visual formatting. Bold, italics, font sizes, colors, and CSS layout are all dropped because there is nowhere for them to live in a text file. Tables collapse into sequential lines, and the precise column structure is not preserved. This is expected: you are trading presentation for portability.

Links and images are the interesting middle ground. Turn on Preserve Links to render an anchor as [text](url) so the destination survives in a readable form, and turn on Include Image Alt Text to keep the descriptive alt attribute instead of silently dropping the image. If you would rather have a cleaner read, leave those off, or use Ignore Images and Ignore HR Tags to suppress placeholders and horizontal rules entirely.

A worked example

Suppose you paste this fragment: a paragraph reading Visit our shop where shop is a link to example.com, followed by a second paragraph that contains the entity Tom & Jerry. With Preserve Links and Decode HTML Entities enabled, the output becomes two clean lines: Visit our [shop](https://example.com) on the first line and Tom & Jerry on the second. The p tags became line breaks, the anchor was rewritten in bracket-and-parenthesis form, and & was decoded back into a literal ampersand.

Why HTML entities matter

HTML escapes certain characters so the browser does not mistake them for markup. An ampersand is written &amp;, a less-than sign is &lt;, a non-breaking space is &nbsp;, and curly quotes often appear as &#8220; and &#8221;. If you skip decoding, those raw sequences leak into your text and look broken. Enable Decode HTML Entities and they are converted back into the real characters they represent: &, <, a normal space, and the proper quotation marks. This single setting is the most common fix for output that looks almost right but is peppered with stray ampersand codes.

Controlling line breaks and wrapping

Two settings shape how the result is laid out. Preserve Line Breaks keeps the breaks implied by block elements so paragraphs stay separated, while Preserve Whitespace retains runs of spaces and indentation that HTML would normally collapse, which is useful when the original spacing is meaningful, such as in code or ASCII layouts.

Word Wrap sets a maximum number of characters per line and re-flows long paragraphs to fit, which is handy for pasting into a terminal, a fixed-width email, or a plain-text README. Set it to 0 to disable wrapping entirely so each paragraph stays on a single long line, ready for a destination that does its own wrapping.

Real-world use cases

Reach for this tool whenever rich content needs to become neutral text. Common cases include lifting clean copy out of a published web page for reuse or quoting, sanitizing a CMS or newsletter export before importing it elsewhere, pulling the readable body out of an HTML email, preparing content for a word count or readability check, and feeding clean prose into a translation tool or a script that expects plain input rather than tags.

It is also a quick sanity check during development. Converting a rendered template to text reveals the actual reading order and exposes content that is visually hidden by CSS but still present in the markup, which can matter for accessibility and SEO audits.

Common mistakes to avoid

The biggest trap is expecting layout to survive. If you need the table structure, the bullet hierarchy, or the styling preserved, plain text is the wrong target. Convert to Markdown or keep the HTML instead. A second pitfall is forgetting to decode entities and then wondering why the output contains &amp; everywhere. Finally, remember that conversion only reflects what is in the markup you paste: if a page builds its content with JavaScript after load, the raw HTML you copy from View Source may be nearly empty, so copy the rendered DOM instead.