Remove HTML Tags
Strip all HTML tags from your markup and get clean plain text. Optionally preserve line breaks, decode HTML entities, and preview the rendered HTML in a sandboxed frame.
How to use the HTML tag remover
Paste your HTML into the editor. The tag count badge shows how many tags were found. Check “Preserve line breaks” if your HTML has paragraph structure you want to keep as newlines. Check “Decode entities” to convert &, <, etc. to their real characters. Toggle the HTML preview to see how the input renders before stripping it.
How HTML tag stripping works
When “preserve line breaks” is enabled, block-level elements (<p>, <div>, <br>,<h1>–<h6>, <li>,<tr>) are replaced with newlines first. Then all remaining<...> sequences are removed with a regex pass. Entity decoding converts named and numeric HTML entities to their Unicode equivalents. A final optional trim step removes leading and trailing whitespace from each line.
Common uses for HTML stripping
Cleaning web-scraped content before storing it in a database. Converting email HTML to plain-text fallback. Extracting readable text from CMS export files. Sanitising user-submitted content before analysis. Preparing HTML documentation for plain-text search indexing. Generating alt-text or summaries from HTML article bodies.
Frequently asked questions
What HTML tags does this tool remove?
All of them. Any text matching the pattern <...> is stripped — including standard HTML tags (<p>, <div>, <span>, <a href="...">), self-closing tags (<br />, <img />), HTML comments (<!-- -->), and XML/SVG tags. It does not remove the content between tags — only the tags themselves. So '<b>hello</b>' becomes 'hello'.
What does 'preserve line breaks' do?
Block-level HTML elements like <p>, <br>, <div>, <h1>–<h6>, and <li> create visual line breaks in a browser but don't contain a \n character in the raw HTML. When you strip the tags without this option, all the content runs together as one paragraph. 'Preserve line breaks' converts those block-level closing tags to newlines before stripping, so the visual structure of the text is maintained.
What are HTML entities and why do they need decoding?
HTML entities are codes that represent characters that would otherwise be interpreted as HTML syntax: & is &, < is <, > is >, is a non-breaking space, " is a double quote. They appear in HTML source but should display as their actual characters in plain text. The 'Decode HTML entities' option converts them back: '&copy; 2024' becomes '© 2024'.
Can I use this to extract text from a webpage?
Yes. Copy the HTML source of a webpage (View Source → Select All → Copy), paste it here, enable 'Preserve line breaks' and 'Decode HTML entities', and click Replace. The result is the readable text content of the page, stripped of all markup. Useful for content audits, word counts on live pages, or importing web content into a document.
Does this sanitise HTML for security purposes?
No. This is a text processing tool, not a security sanitisation library. For production web applications where you need to display user-submitted HTML safely, use a dedicated library like DOMPurify. Those libraries understand context, attribute values, and event handler injection — this tool does not. Never use output from this tool as a safe-to-render HTML string.
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