Strip HTML Tags and Extract the Readable Text

About the HTML to TXT Converter

Regular expressions are the wrong tool for stripping HTML, and everyone who has tried it has the scars to prove it. This uses the browser's real parser instead, so unclosed tags, nested structures and the sort of markup that arrives from a content management system are all handled the way a browser would handle them.

After parsing, script, style and no-script elements are removed entirely — otherwise their contents would end up in your text as stray code. Line breaks are then inserted after the elements that represent a break in reading: paragraphs, divisions, all six heading levels, list items, line breaks and table rows. Runs of spaces and tabs are collapsed to single spaces, and stacked blank lines are reduced to one, which is what turns machine-generated markup into something a person can read.

Key Features

• Parsed, not pattern-matched: The browser's HTML engine does the work, so malformed markup and deeply nested structures come out correctly rather than leaving fragments of tags behind.
• Hidden content removed: Script, style and no-script blocks are stripped before extraction, so stylesheet rules and JavaScript never appear in the output.
• Line breaks where they belong: Breaks are added after block-level elements, so paragraphs and list items stay separated instead of running together into one continuous string.
• Whitespace normalised: Repeated spaces and tabs collapse to one and long runs of blank lines shrink to a single gap, cleaning up the indentation markup usually carries.
• On screen and as a file: The text appears in a box you can read and select immediately, and a .txt download is produced alongside it.
• Nothing is fetched or sent: Parsing happens entirely in the tab on markup you supply, so saved pages and exported emails are cleaned without a request going anywhere.

How to Use the HTML to TXT Converter

1. Add an .html file, or paste markup into the box instead.
2. Press Convert to TXT.
3. Read the extracted text in the box that appears.
4. Take the .txt download, or select and copy from the box directly.

How It Works

The extraction takes the text content of the parsed document, which means anything that is not text is left behind. Three losses are worth anticipating.

Hyperlink addresses do not survive. The visible text of a link is kept, but the address it points to is an attribute rather than text, so it disappears. For a content audit where you need to know what a page links to, this is the wrong tool — you want to work on the markup directly.

Table structure also goes. Row endings produce a line break, but there is nothing separating one cell from the next, so the cells of a row run together as continuous text with no delimiter. A page that is largely tabular will come out difficult to interpret.

List markers are not text either. Items are separated onto their own lines, but the bullets and numbers were generated by the browser's rendering rather than stored in the markup, so the lines arrive unmarked. Heading levels are flattened for the same reason — a heading becomes a line of text like any other, with its prominence gone.

Image alternative text is also absent, since an image element contains no text content.

When You Need It

Someone taking an inventory of a website before a migration needs the readable copy from each page as plain text, so it can be counted, compared against the new build and checked for anything that must not be lost. Working from saved pages locally is faster than a crawl and avoids pointing an external service at a site that has not launched.

An accessibility reviewer wants to see what remains of a page once the visual presentation is removed, which is a reasonable first approximation of what a screen reader user encounters. Reading the text in isolation exposes headings that carry no meaning on their own and link text that says nothing useful out of context.