HTML to Text Converter
Convert HTML code to plain text or plain text to HTML instantly. Strip HTML tags, decode entities, or wrap your text in proper HTML markup.
HTML and Plain Text
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard language used to structure content on the web. It uses tags such as <p>, <h1>, and <a> to define paragraphs, headings, links, and other elements. Plain text, by contrast, contains no markup — it is raw characters with no formatting instructions, making it universally readable by any application or system. Converting between the two formats is a common task in content management, data processing, and email handling.
When to Convert Between Formats
There are many situations where you need to switch between HTML and plain text. Developers scraping web pages need plain text to extract meaningful content without wading through markup. Email marketers often need a plain text fallback for HTML emails because some clients or spam filters prefer it. Content creators migrating posts between platforms may receive HTML that needs to be stripped before importing into a new CMS. Going the other direction, writers who have plain text may need basic HTML wrapping before uploading to a website. If your content originates in Microsoft Word, our Word to HTML converter strips Microsoft-specific markup before you even get to this tool. For precise control over which formatting elements to keep or discard during that conversion, use the Word to HTML format converter. Our remove line breaks tool is a useful companion for cleaning up the plain text results after conversion. If the converted plain text has multiple blank lines between sections, use the empty line remover to collapse or strip those gaps. To strip extra spaces and trailing whitespace from converted text, use the remove white spaces tool. Once you have clean plain text, you can turn it into a shareable document using our text file to PDF converter, which lets you set font size, page size, and margins before downloading the formatted PDF.
Paste Your HTML, Get Clean Text
The instant converter on this page processes your input entirely in the browser. No data is sent to a server, and results appear immediately. Whether you are stripping a few tags from a paragraph or converting an entire HTML document to readable text, the tool handles both small and large inputs the same way. For more complex conversions involving custom formatting rules, conditional tag handling, or intelligent restructuring, the AI tab in the left panel can help.
How to use the tool
Paste Your Content
Copy HTML source or plain text from any source — a webpage, email, CMS, or text editor — and paste it into the textarea.
Choose a Direction
Select "HTML to Plain Text" to strip tags and decode entities, or "Plain Text to HTML" to wrap your text in paragraph tags.
Click Convert Now
The result appears instantly in the output box below. No waiting, no server processing, no data stored.
Copy and Use
Click Copy to copy the result to your clipboard and paste it wherever you need it.
Conversion Options Explained
The HTML to Plain Text option strips all HTML tags from your input, converts block-level elements such as <p> and <br> into line breaks, and decodes common HTML entities like &, <, and . The Plain Text to HTML option wraps each paragraph (separated by blank lines) in <p> tags, replaces single line breaks with <br>, and escapes special characters so they display correctly in a browser.
Migrating Content, Scraping Pages, and Cleaning Emails
HTML to text conversion is essential in three particularly common workflows: content migration between platforms, web scraping for data extraction, and preparing plain text versions of HTML emails. Each workflow has its own requirements and edge cases, and understanding them helps you choose the right conversion approach.
Extracting Text from Web Pages
When scraping web pages, the HTML source contains a mix of structural tags, navigation elements, scripts, style blocks, and actual content. Converting raw HTML to plain text strips all of this and leaves only the readable text, which can then be processed for keyword analysis, sentiment analysis, or content summarization. For best results when scraping, copy only the relevant section of the HTML rather than the entire page source, as scripts and style sheets add noise to the output. You can use our AI text analyzer to further process the extracted plain text.
Preparing Content for Email
HTML emails should always include a plain text alternative in the MIME envelope. Many email service providers generate this automatically, but when you are writing custom templates or transactional emails, you often need to create the plain text version manually. Converting your HTML template to plain text gives you a starting point. You will typically need to replace links with descriptive text and remove any image references, since plain text cannot render either. For writing professional email content, our email writer generator can help draft the initial content before you convert it.
Cleaning HTML for Data Processing
Data pipelines that ingest text from web sources often receive HTML-encoded content in database fields or API responses. Before storing or analyzing this content, the HTML needs to be stripped to avoid downstream issues with text search, natural language processing, or display rendering. This tool provides a fast, client-side way to clean individual samples. For bulk processing in a programming context, libraries such as BeautifulSoup in Python or the DOMParser API in JavaScript offer the same stripping logic programmatically.
Handling Entities, Attributes, and Nested Tags
Beyond simple tag removal, HTML conversion involves handling several categories of content that require special treatment: HTML entities, tag attributes such as href and alt, and deeply nested tag structures. The instant converter handles the most common cases, while the AI tab can interpret these more intelligently.
Stripping HTML Tags from Code
Stripping tags means removing everything between and including angle brackets. A simple regex approach (/<[^>]+>/g) works for well-formed HTML but can fail on malformed markup or on content that contains unescaped angle brackets inside attribute values. The converter on this page uses a robust stripping approach that preserves natural spacing by converting block-level elements to line breaks before stripping. This prevents words from running together when adjacent tags are removed. For a dedicated tool focused solely on stripping markup with options to keep line breaks, decode entities, or remove only inline styles, use our remove HTML tags tool. If you need to find and replace specific words or phrases in the resulting plain text, our replace text online tool handles plain-text, whole-word, and regex replacements in one click.
Converting Plain Text to HTML Paragraphs
When converting plain text to HTML, the key decisions are how to handle paragraph breaks and single line breaks. This tool treats double line breaks (a blank line between paragraphs) as paragraph separators and wraps each block in <p> tags. Single line breaks within a paragraph are converted to <br> tags. Special characters like <, >, and & are escaped to their entity equivalents so the text renders correctly rather than being interpreted as markup. To further structure the resulting HTML, our AI HTML generator can help you build complete page templates. If your plain text content is a list of items, use the HTML list generator to convert it directly into properly formatted <ul>, <ol>, or <dl> markup. If your converted content includes raw URLs that need to become clickable links, use the URL to HTML link converter to wrap them in properly formatted anchor tags.
Decoding HTML Entities
HTML entities are special character sequences used to represent characters that have special meaning in HTML or that cannot be typed directly. Common examples include & for the ampersand, < and > for angle brackets, for a non-breaking space, and numeric entities like © for the copyright symbol. When converting HTML to plain text, these entities must be decoded back to their original characters so the output reads naturally. The converter handles named entities for the most common characters as well as numeric and hexadecimal entity codes. To go in the opposite direction and encode special characters into HTML entities — or to work with the full range of named and numeric entity references — use our dedicated HTML character encoding tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is HTML?
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the standard markup language used to create and structure content on the web. HTML uses a system of elements represented by tags — such as <p> for paragraphs, <h1> for headings, and <a> for links — to define the structure and meaning of web content. Browsers read HTML files and render them as visual web pages. HTML is not a programming language; it is a markup language that describes the structure of content.
What is plain text?
Plain text is unformatted text that contains only printable characters and basic whitespace such as spaces and line breaks. It has no embedded fonts, colors, styles, or markup. Plain text is the most universally compatible format because any application that can handle text can read it. Common plain text formats include .txt files and the body of raw email messages. Unlike rich text or HTML, plain text cannot encode formatting like bold, italic, or hyperlinks — only the raw characters themselves.
Does this strip all formatting?
Yes, the HTML to Plain Text conversion strips all HTML tags and converts structural elements to line breaks, leaving only the raw text content and whitespace. Inline formatting such as bold, italic, underline, and color is removed entirely. Block-level elements like paragraphs, headings, and divs are converted to blank lines to preserve the visual separation of content sections. Link text is preserved but URLs in href attributes are not included in the output by default.
Can I convert rich text to HTML?
Rich text (RTF) is a different format from plain text and HTML. This tool converts between HTML and plain text specifically. If you have rich text from a Word document or email client, you can first copy and paste the visible text into the plain text input, then convert it to HTML using the Plain Text to HTML option. For more complex rich text to HTML conversions that need to preserve structure, the Convert with AI tab can handle custom formatting instructions.
Does it preserve links?
When converting HTML to plain text, link text (the visible anchor text between <a> and </a> tags) is preserved in the output. However, the href URL is not included because plain text has no way to represent a hyperlink as a separate clickable element. If you need to preserve URLs in the plain text output, use the Convert with AI tab and specify in your instructions that you want URLs included after the link text.
Is my data stored?
No. The Instant HTML Converter tab processes your content entirely within your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server. The text is only held temporarily in browser memory while the tab is open and is cleared when you navigate away or reset the form. The Convert with AI tab sends your text to an AI API to generate the conversion result, but no text is stored permanently on any server.
What is html to text?
HTML to text refers to the process of taking HTML-formatted content — which contains tags, attributes, and entities — and converting it into plain, readable text without any markup. This is useful when you need the human-readable content from a web page without the surrounding code. The result is a clean block of text that can be used in any application that accepts plain text input, from spreadsheets to databases to email clients.
What is text converter to html?
A text converter to HTML is a tool that takes plain text input and wraps it in appropriate HTML tags to make it suitable for display on a web page. At a minimum this involves wrapping paragraphs in <p> tags and escaping special characters. More advanced converters can detect structure in the plain text — such as lines that look like headings or items that look like lists — and apply the appropriate HTML tags. The AI conversion option on this page can handle these more complex detection tasks.
What is text to html converter?
A text to HTML converter transforms plain, unformatted text into valid HTML markup. The most common use case is converting paragraphs of plain text into HTML paragraphs ready to be inserted into a web page or CMS. This tool does this automatically: blank lines between paragraphs are interpreted as paragraph separators, single line breaks become <br> tags, and special characters are escaped to their HTML entity equivalents. The result is valid, renderable HTML you can copy directly into a page template or editor.
What is plain text converter?
A plain text converter is any tool that transforms content from a formatted or markup-based format into plain, unformatted text. HTML to text converters, rich text strippers, and PDF text extractors are all types of plain text converters. The goal is to produce text that contains only readable characters without any formatting codes, tags, or embedded instructions. Plain text converters are widely used in data processing, content migration, and email preparation workflows. See also our free AI text tools for additional text processing utilities.