Strip HTML Tags
Remove HTML tags from text and extract plain text content. Options to preserve links and line breaks.
What is Strip HTML Tags?
An HTML tag stripper removes all HTML markup from text, leaving only the visible content. When you copy text from a webpage, it often carries invisible HTML formatting — bold tags, paragraph markers, span elements, div wrappers, and style attributes. This tool extracts the clean text content, removing all < > tags and their attributes while preserving the readable content between them. It optionally handles HTML entities (converting & to &, < to <) and can preserve line breaks from block-level elements.
How It Works
The tool uses a robust HTML parser that identifies all tag patterns (opening tags, closing tags, self-closing tags, comments, and CDATA sections) and removes them while preserving text nodes. It handles malformed HTML gracefully, processes nested tags correctly, and converts HTML entities to their character equivalents. Block-level elements like <p>, <div>, and <br> can optionally be converted to newlines to maintain the document's visual paragraph structure in the plain text output.
Common Use Cases
- •Extracting clean text from HTML email content for plain-text versions of newsletters
- •Cleaning copied web content for use in plain-text documents or databases
- •Preparing text from CMS-generated HTML for use in non-HTML contexts (SMS, plain email)
- •Stripping formatting from rich text editor output to get raw content for processing
- •Cleaning HTML from RSS feed content for text-only display or analysis
- •Removing markup from scraped web data to get clean text for natural language processing
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it decode HTML entities?▼
Yes, common entities like &, <, >, " are automatically decoded.
Does removing the tags also remove the script and style contents?▼
Yes. Simply deleting angle-bracket tags would leave the CSS rules and JavaScript source behind as visible text, so the contents of `<script>` and `<style>` elements are discarded along with the tags themselves.
What happens to HTML entities such as &nbsp; and &amp;?▼
They are decoded to the characters they represent, so `&` becomes `&`, `<` becomes `<`, and ` ` becomes a space. Without that step the plain text output would still be littered with entity codes.
Is the paragraph structure preserved?▼
Block-level elements such as `<p>`, `<div>`, `<br>`, `<li>` and the heading tags are converted to line breaks, so the text keeps its shape. Inline elements like `<strong>`, `<em>` and `<a>` are removed without adding whitespace, which keeps sentences intact.
Is this safe to use for sanitising user input before display?▼
No. Treat this as a text-extraction convenience, not a security control. Stripping tags client-side is not a defence against cross-site scripting — sanitise on the server with a maintained library such as DOMPurify or a server-side equivalent, and escape on output.
Can I keep some tags and remove the rest?▼
This tool removes all markup. If you need a subset of tags preserved, strip everything here and reapply the formatting you want, or use the Find and Replace tool with a regex targeting only the specific tags you want gone.
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