Strip HTML tags

Extract visible text from HTML using the browser parser.

Overview

The relationship between text and markup on the web is a layer of abstraction that most users never see, but every developer knows well: what appears in the browser as a bold paragraph with a link is in reality a sequence of characters like `<p><strong>text</strong> and <a href='...'>link</a></p>`. This separation between content and presentation was one of the founding ideas of the HTML created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 — text and structure would be encoded together, and visual presentation would be handled by the browser. With CSS arriving in the 1990s and solidifying in the early 2000s, the separation became clearer, but the fusion of text and markup in HTML never went away. Every time you copy text from a web page into a rich text editor, you feel the effects: fonts, colors, and spacing are pasted along with the text, because the HTML is invisible in the middle.

The need to extract just the text from HTML arises in a surprisingly wide range of contexts. Web scraping: you downloaded the HTML of a page and only need the editorial content without the menus, footers, and tag boilerplate. HTML email processing: modern email clients send messages in HTML and you need to index or analyze just the text. CMS migration: importing content from one platform to another where the editor does not accept raw HTML. Sentiment analysis or text analysis: NLP models and LLMs work with plain text, not HTML. RSS feeds: many feeds include descriptions in HTML and you need plain text to display in minimalist interfaces. All these cases share the same pattern: the HTML is the vehicle, and you want only the payload inside it.

This tool uses the DOM parser built into the browser itself — the same one Chrome, Firefox, or Safari uses to render pages — which has an important implication: the extracted text is what the browser would consider visible, following real HTML parsing rules. Malformed tags are tolerated. HTML entities like `&amp;`, `&lt;`, and `&nbsp;` are correctly decoded to their corresponding characters. Scripts and `<style>` tags are discarded along with the markup. One practical limitation: the tool does not execute JavaScript, so content dynamically generated by scripts in the pasted HTML will not be expanded. For static HTML — the most common case in the use cases above — the result faithfully matches what you would see in a browser.

Technical deep dive

Common questions summarized

  • What is this tool for?: It runs fully in your browser: useful to validate, format, or convert data in everyday development.
  • Are my inputs sent to a server?: Processing happens locally with JavaScript. We do not store what you paste into the text areas.
  • Can I use this for real production data?: Use at your own risk. For secrets (passwords, tokens), prefer controlled environments and your company policies. And always review the generated contents. Never trust blindly things you see on the internet.

Sample payload to try

  • See also the larger "Code Snippets" sample; paste this excerpt to try locally: Input — <p>Olá <strong>mundo</strong></p> → Olá mundo

Tool guide

  • What HTML is See HTML Escape. Here the goal is visible text, not structure.

  • What the tool does Uses the browser parser to extract text from an HTML fragment (tags are dropped; pasted scripts are not executed as on a live page).

  • Why use it Paste page snippets and keep readable text only, quote without markup, or prep simple NLP input.

Code Snippets

Code example
<p>Olá <strong>mundo</strong></p> → Olá mundo

Input

<p>Olá <strong>mundo</strong></p> → Olá mundo

FAQ

What is this tool for?

It runs fully in your browser: useful to validate, format, or convert data in everyday development.

Are my inputs sent to a server?

Processing happens locally with JavaScript. We do not store what you paste into the text areas.

Can I use this for real production data?

Use at your own risk. For secrets (passwords, tokens), prefer controlled environments and your company policies. And always review the generated contents. Never trust blindly things you see on the internet.