Strip HTML Tags

How to use Strip HTML Tags

1. Paste your HTML.
2. The plain text appears immediately, with paragraphs separated.
3. Copy the result.
4. Script, style and comment contents are removed entirely, not just their tags.
5. Block-level elements become line breaks so paragraphs and list items stay separate.
6. Processing runs in your browser — email content and drafts are not transmitted.

Why removing only the tags is not enough

A naive stripper deletes anything between angle brackets, which leaves the contents of script and style elements sitting in the output — so pasting a web page gives you its JavaScript and CSS mixed into the prose. This tool removes those elements whole, along with HTML comments, before stripping the remaining tags. It also converts block-level closing tags to line breaks, because otherwise every paragraph and list item runs into the next as one wall of text.

Entities are decoded after the tags go

Escaped markup in the source — <b> written as text rather than as a tag — should survive as visible text, so entities are decoded last. Doing it the other way round would turn that escaped example into a real tag and then strip it, silently losing content. The same order matters for &, which must be decoded after the others or it re-creates entities that have already been resolved.

What it is useful for

Getting the text out of an HTML email or a newsletter. Recovering copy from an exported page when the original document is gone. Counting the real words in a piece of formatted content. Cleaning a rich-text paste before putting it into a plain-text field. Preparing content for a search index or a text analysis tool that would otherwise count markup as words.

For rendering rather than reading, this is the wrong tool

Stripping tags is a way to read text, not a way to make untrusted HTML safe to display. If you are taking user-submitted HTML and putting it back into a page, you need a sanitiser that keeps the safe markup and removes the dangerous parts — DOMPurify is the standard answer. Stripping everything and re-inserting is both lossy and, done carelessly, still unsafe.