✂️ HTML Tag Stripper
Remove HTML tags from text and keep the plain text content. Preserves line breaks from common block tags. Allowlist for tags you want to keep.
Last updated: May 21, 2026 · By Λ
Strip HTML and keep the readable text
Plain text extraction is a common preprocessing step when you scrape a web page, parse an email, prepare content for a search index, or count words in a document that came in as HTML. This tool removes every HTML tag from the input and returns the visible text. By default it preserves line breaks around block-level tags like p, div, and h1 through h6, decodes character entities like & back into &, and collapses runs of whitespace into single spaces. You can keep specific tags by listing them in the allowlist.
Parsing happens with the browser's own DOMParser, so even malformed HTML is handled the same way a browser would render it. Script and style blocks are dropped by default since their contents are not human-readable text. If you want to keep them for some reason, uncheck the "Drop script and style content" option. The tool never sends your input to a server, which matters when the HTML you are working with contains private content or internal data.
How to use this tool
- Paste HTML into the Input box on the left.
- Toggle "Preserve line breaks" off if you want the output as a single line.
- Add tag names to the allowlist (for example "a, strong, em") to keep certain inline tags in the output.
- Click "Copy" to send the cleaned text to your clipboard.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this safe to use on untrusted HTML?
Yes. The HTML is parsed with DOMParser and rendered into an inert document, then the tag tree is walked to extract text. No scripts run, no images load, and no resources are fetched.
What is the difference between this and using innerText in DevTools?
innerText reflects the current page layout, including CSS rules that hide text. This tool extracts text from raw HTML without applying CSS, which is usually what you want when processing scraped or stored markup.
Does it strip attributes from kept tags?
By default, attributes on kept tags are preserved. If you want a pure tag-only output without attributes, run the result through the tool a second time with a stricter allowlist.
Why does my output have weird Unicode characters?
If the source HTML uses Windows-1252 encoded smart quotes or other non-ASCII punctuation, those characters survive in the output. To normalize them, run the result through a case converter or a custom find-and-replace in your editor.