Free HTML tag stripper

HTML tag stripper

What the HTML tag stripper does

This tool takes raw HTML source, the kind you get from viewing page source, a scraped page or an exported feed, and strips out the markup, leaving the text content behind. Every tag and its attributes go, script and style blocks are removed with their contents, and a small set of entities is decoded back into plain characters.

It runs in your browser. Paste your markup, strip it, copy the result. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and no cap on how much source you process.

How it works

How to strip HTML tags from source in three steps

No configuration, no build step.

Step 1

Paste your HTML source into the input box.

Step 2

Press Strip HTML. It processes instantly, locally.

Step 3

Copy the plain text out of the output box.

What gets touched

Tags, attributes, script blocks and style blocks

A tag, an attribute and a script or style block are three different things, and this tool handles each one. Every tag, opening and closing, is removed. Every attribute inside a tag, class, id, style, every data attribute and every href, is removed along with the tag it lives in, since attributes never render as visible text.

Script and style blocks are treated differently again: the whole block is removed, tags and contents together, because JavaScript and CSS were never text meant for a reader in the first place. A page that is mostly boilerplate and scripting can strip down to a surprisingly small amount of actual text.

Entities

Decoding HTML entities: what this tool does and doesn't cover

An entity is a character written in code because the literal character would be read as markup or couldn't be typed safely into a document: & for an ampersand, < and > for the angle brackets a real less-than or greater-than sign would be confused for.

Four entities are decoded automatically here:  , &, < and >. That covers the overwhelming majority of what appears in ordinary markup. Numeric entities like ’ for a curly apostrophe, and named entities like ©, — or ’, are left exactly as written, since there is no fixed list of every entity that could appear. Check the output if your source used typographic punctuation this way.

Worth knowing

A regex-based stripper, not a full HTML parser

This tool matches and removes tag patterns; it does not build a document tree the way a browser or a real parser does. For well-formed HTML, the two approaches produce the same result. For malformed markup, or for a stray angle bracket used as a mathematical comparison inside otherwise plain text, a regex pass can behave differently from a full parser. Review the output on anything irregular before relying on it.

Why it matters

What unstripped markup actually breaks downstream

Feed a page's raw source into a word counter, a translation tool or a plagiarism checker and every tag name gets counted as text, skewing the result. Paste unstripped markup into a field that expects plain text and the tags either render wrong or show up as literal angle brackets.

In data pipelines it is sharper still: an unescaped tag sitting inside a JSON string or a CSV field pulled from scraped HTML can break parsing entirely, with an error that gives no hint the actual cause was a leftover <div>.

Who uses it

Who uses an HTML tag stripper, and when

Developers cleaning scraped pages before feeding them into a pipeline, a search index or a language model use it as a first pass. People working with exported feeds, RSS content or old CMS dumps use it to get readable text out of markup nobody wants to keep.

It also comes up in QA: pasting the rendered output of a template to check that no stray tag or unescaped entity made it into what a reader will actually see.