Pull readable text out of HTML markup

HTML is great for browsers and awkward for everything else. When you copy a snippet from a page source, a CMS editor, an email template or an API response, you often just need the words without the angle brackets. HTML Tag Remover takes the markup you paste and returns only the text content, along with a small report on what changed.

How to strip the tags

1. Paste your HTML into the Source Text (HTML) box. The paste icon reads from your clipboard and the bin icon empties the box. A live word and character counter sits above it.
2. Click Strip HTML Tags. There are no toggles, so the same rules apply every time.
3. Read the Sanitized Result. Below it, Tags Stripped shows how many tags were matched and Size Reduced shows the percentage drop in length.
4. Check the Side-by-Side Comparison, which shows the first 300 characters of the original and the processed text.
5. Use the copy icon or the download icon, which saves cleaned-text.txt.

How it interprets your input

The tool hands your text to the browser's own HTML parser and then reads back the text content. That is more reliable than a simple find-and-delete of anything between angle brackets, because it copes with attributes that contain a greater-than sign and with named entities. For example, an ampersand entity comes out as a plain ampersand.

Situations where it helps

• Turning a blog post or product description copied from a page source into plain copy for a spreadsheet.
• Checking how much visible text an HTML email really contains.
• Cleaning rich-text export from a CMS before importing it elsewhere.
• Reading the message field of a JSON response that contains embedded markup.

Limits worth knowing

• No spaces or line breaks are added between elements. Text in adjacent paragraph, heading or list tags can run together, such as two words joined where one paragraph ended and the next began. Line breaks that already exist in your source are kept, so paste HTML with newlines between blocks if you want them to stay separate.
• The text inside style and script elements is not removed. It counts as text content, so strip those blocks by hand first.
• Image alt text and link addresses live in attributes and are discarded.
• Tags Stripped counts each opening and closing tag separately, so the number is roughly double the number of elements.

Only paste markup you trust, because the parsing happens in your browser page. For a version with an entity-decoding option, see the separate Strip HTML Tags tool.

Related Tools

Related Tools

• Add Line Breaks
• Add Prefix
• Add Suffix
• Add Watermark