What Gets Stripped and What Survives
Every HTML tag is removed, along with the entire contents of <style> and <script> blocks (their contents are code or CSS, not page content, so they're excluded rather than dumped in as text). Inline formatting like bold, italic, and links has no plain-text equivalent, so it's simply dropped, keeping just the visible text itself. Block-level elements (paragraphs, headings, list items, table rows, line breaks) become line breaks in the output when line-break preservation is enabled, so the result still reads as separate paragraphs and list items rather than one run-on line, even though the HTML structure itself is gone.
HTML Entity Decoding
HTML source text often contains entity references instead of the literal character, either because the character isn't easily typeable (— for an em dash) or to escape characters that are otherwise special in HTML (& for a literal ampersand, </> for literal angle brackets). This tool decodes the common named entities (&, <, >, ", , ©, and similar), plus numeric references in both decimal (—) and hexadecimal (—) form, converting them back to their actual characters in the plain-text output.
Preserving Link URLs
By default, a link's href is discarded along with every other tag, leaving just its visible link text. Enabling "Show link URLs" instead appends the URL in brackets right after the link text, like Documentation [https://example.com/docs], so the destination isn't lost even though the output is plain text with no clickable links.
Common Use Cases
Extracting readable text from a scraped webpage or an HTML email body is the most common use, useful for feeding content into a plain-text-only destination (an SMS, a plain-text email reply, a search index, an LLM prompt) where markup would just be noise. Cleaning up HTML pasted from a rich-text editor or CMS field into plain text before further processing (word counting, readability scoring, translation) is another common workflow.
Limitations vs. a Full HTML Parser
This tool uses a lightweight, pattern-based approach rather than parsing HTML into a full document tree, which keeps it fast but means a few edge cases in genuinely malformed or unusual HTML (like a raw > character appearing inside a quoted attribute value) can occasionally produce imperfect output. For well-formed, typical webpage or CMS-exported HTML, this doesn't come up in practice. As an html to text converter, it works to remove html tags online as a general html tag stripper, supports html to text with links preserved, produces clean text from html, acts as an html entity decoder, and helps convert html to readable text overall.