Scripts and styles never leak
The contents of <script>, <style> and HTML comments are dropped wholesale rather than stripped of their tags, so JavaScript and CSS do not appear as stray text in the output.
TextRuns in your browser
Strip HTML Tags
Convert HTML to plain text by removing tags, scripts and styles safely.
- Input
- No upload needed — instant
- Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up · no watermark
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Processed entirely on your device
Everything you type or paste is handled by JavaScript running in this tab. No request is sent, nothing is logged and nothing is stored. Close the page and it is gone.
Overview
About the Strip HTML Tags
Remove HTML tags and convert markup to clean plain text. Drops script, style and comment contents, turns block tags into line breaks and decodes entities.
Getting clean text out of HTML looks like a one-liner — delete everything between angle brackets — until you try it on real markup. A naive strip leaves the body of a <script> tag sitting in your output as JavaScript, merges two paragraphs into one run-on sentence, and leaves & and scattered through the text. Doing it properly means treating HTML as structure, not as a string with tags in it.
What a correct strip has to handle
Non-content elements. <script>, <style> and <!-- comments --> hold content that is never meant to be read. Their entire bodies must be removed, not just their tags.
Block boundaries. <p>, <br>, <li>, <div>, table cells and headings all imply a break. Replacing them with a newline keeps lists as lists and paragraphs as paragraphs.
Inline tags. <strong>, <em>, <a> and <span> carry no break — their tags vanish and their text flows together, which is correct.
Entities. After the tags are gone the text still contains &, <, — and friends. Decoding them is what turns the output into something you can actually read.
Options and when to change them
For extracting an article to read or count, leave all three on. When you are feeding the text into something that will re-format it anyway, turning off line breaks gives you a single block to work with.
Where this fits
Stripping HTML is a step in many larger jobs: pulling the readable text out of a scraped page before summarising it, cleaning a rich-text editor export before storing plain text, extracting an email body, or preparing copy for a word count. For a PDF rather than a web page, the PDF-to-text tool does the equivalent job from a different source format.
Step by step
How to use the Strip HTML Tags
Paste the HTML fragment, page source or rich-text export.
Choose whether to decode entities, keep line breaks and collapse spaces.
Read the extracted plain text, which updates as you type.
Copy the text or download it for use elsewhere.
Why use it
Benefits and common use cases
What this tool is good for, and what it deliberately does not try to do.
Paragraphs stay readable
Block-level tags such as <p>, <br>, <li> and headings become line breaks, so a list stays a list and paragraphs do not run together into one wall of text.
Entities decoded in the same pass
&, < and numeric references are turned back into the characters they represent, giving you genuinely readable text rather than half-escaped markup.
Local and private
The extraction happens in your browser. Email templates, scraped pages and confidential documents are converted without a single network request.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers about quality, limits and privacy.
Does it remove the text inside script and style tags too?
Yes. Simply deleting tags would leave the JavaScript and CSS behind as text, which is almost never what you want. This tool removes those elements and their contents entirely, along with HTML comments, before stripping the remaining tags.
Will my paragraphs and lists keep their structure?
If you leave “Keep line breaks” on, block-level tags are replaced with newlines, so paragraphs, list items and headings each start on their own line. Turn it off to get everything on a single continuous line.
Can it handle a full web page?
It will strip the tags from anything you paste, including a whole document, and you will get the visible text. For a very large page the doctype, head metadata and any inline scripts are removed along with the markup, leaving the body text.
Is this the same as decoding HTML entities?
No, though they overlap. Stripping tags removes the markup structure; decoding entities converts codes like & back to characters. This tool does both in one pass, and you can switch entity decoding off if you only want the tags gone.