Content pasted from a web page, email, or CMS often carries hidden HTML tags, inline styles, and scripts. This strip HTML tags tool removes all of them and returns clean, readable plain text — useful for notes, imports, word counts, and feeding text into other tools.
How it works
The cleaning is pure text processing, never rendering:
- Remove code blocks. Entire
<script>and<style>blocks and HTML comments are deleted along with their contents, because that content is code, not text. - Strip tags. Every remaining
<...>tag is removed, leaving the text between them. - Optional entity decoding. Codes such as
&,<, and numeric references become their real characters when the option is on. - Optional whitespace collapse. Long runs of spaces and blank lines are squeezed for readable output.
Because no markup is ever inserted into the page, even hostile HTML cannot execute.
Example
Input:
<p>Hello <b>world</b> & welcome!</p><script>alert(1)</script>Output (entities decoded, whitespace collapsed):
Hello world & welcome!The <script> block is dropped entirely, the tags are stripped, and & decodes to &.
When to use entity decoding — and when not to
HTML entities are codes that represent characters that would otherwise be interpreted as markup. The most common are & (the literal & character), < (less-than sign <), > (greater-than sign >), and (non-breaking space).
Turn entity decoding on when you want human-readable text — for example, pasting article content into a notes app, counting words in an essay, or feeding the text to another tool for analysis. The decoded & is what the reader would see in a browser.
Turn entity decoding off when you need to preserve the entities as-is — for example, if you are extracting text to store in a database and want to keep the encoding intact, or if you are debugging the raw HTML content of a page.
When whitespace collapsing helps
HTML ignores most whitespace: multiple spaces collapse to one, newlines between inline elements disappear, and paragraphs are separated by block-level elements rather than blank lines. After stripping tags, the raw text often contains long runs of spaces where chains were and empty lines where block elements sat.
Whitespace collapsing removes those gaps, producing clean prose that reads naturally. Leave it off if the exact spacing matters — for example, when processing pre-formatted text or preserving indentation in code that was wrapped in <pre> tags.
Common use cases
- CMS exports and email content: Marketing emails often arrive as HTML when forwarded. Strip the markup to get clean text for repurposing.
- Web-scraped content: Paste the HTML source of a page and extract just the readable text, stripping navigation, scripts, and styling.
- Word counts and readability analysis: Paste rich-text into other tools without the tags inflating the word count or breaking the analysis.
- AI prompt preparation: Feeding HTML directly to a language model adds noise. Stripping first produces cleaner, more token-efficient input.
Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.