Plain Text Converter
Strip HTML tags, markdown formatting, and special characters to get clean plain text. Free online text cleaner tool.
Three steps to get started
Paste formatted text
Paste HTML, Markdown, or mixed-format text into the input.
Formatting stripped
HTML tags and Markdown syntax removed. Clean readable text preserved.
Copy plain text
Click Copy and paste into any destination that needs plain text.
Strip HTML and Markdown to get clean text
Plain text is text that carries no markup, styling, or structural metadata - just the characters themselves, as defined by the text/plainMIME type. A plain text converter takes marked-up content, whether that markup is HTML tags, Markdown syntax, or a mixture of both, and returns only the human-readable words underneath. Nothing is rewritten or summarised; only the scaffolding is peeled away.
What this converter strips:
- HTML tags:
<p>,<div>,<b>,<a>,<span>and their attributes - HTML entities:
&,<,>,",', - Markdown ATX headings:
#through###### - Markdown emphasis:
**bold**,*italic*,__bold__,_italic_ - Markdown links and images:
[text](url)keeps text,keeps alt - Inline code spans wrapped in backticks
When do you actually need plain text?
The most common trigger is a CMS migration: an export from WordPress, Contentful, or Ghost arrives full of <p> wrappers and sequences that break word counts and readability scores. Others include preparing copy for a system that renders raw text verbatim - SMS gateways, alt attributes, JSON string fields, YAML values, Git commit messages, or a terminal - and cleaning scraped page content before feeding it to a word counter, sentiment model, or translation memory. Email is another: the plain text part of a multipart/alternative message must genuinely be plain, and leaving stray tags in it is a well-known spam-filter signal.
Two gotchas are worth knowing. Stripping tags is not the same as sanitising HTML for security - never treat this output as a defence against XSS, since that requires a proper sanitiser like DOMPurify on the rendering side. And URLs inside Markdown links are discarded by design: if you need to keep the destinations, extract them before converting. Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) that were entered as become ordinary spaces, which is usually what you want but will change how justified text wraps.
The conversion runs as JavaScript inside this tab. Nothing is uploaded, so pasting an unpublished draft or an internal knowledge-base export carries no disclosure risk.