Strip tags and extract readable text from HTML

Extract readable plain text from HTML while preserving block boundaries and decoding entities.

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ToolHTML to Text
Input
Output
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Put this on your own site

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Pick a dark background and the text and panels follow it, so the frame stays readable on a dark page.

Preview

How it works

HTML is parsed into a tree, script and style nodes are removed, block elements contribute line breaks, entities decode, and remaining text nodes are joined with normalized whitespace. Link text can remain while tags disappear.

  • Block-aware breaks preserve paragraphs.
  • Tree parsing handles markup that regex stripping cannot.

Worked example

Extract readable text from a webpage snippet
Strip all HTML tags and extract clean plain text from markup
Input
											<h1>Welcome</h1><p>Visit our <a href="https://example.com">website</a> for more info.</p>
Output
												Welcome

Visit our website for more info.

When to use this

Crawlers, email previews, and search indexes extract prose from web markup.

Edge cases

  • Escaped < text is not an element.
  • Script content must not leak into prose.
  • Whitespace-only nodes between inline elements should not add blank lines.

References