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HTML to Text Converter

The HTML to text converter turns markup into readable plain text while preserving its shape: headings and paragraphs become separated blocks, list items become bullets or numbers, and line breaks are honoured. Script and style content is discarded and HTML entities are decoded, so the result reads as prose rather than as stripped tags.

Options
HTML 0 characters
Plain text

Your result will appear here.

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Results update automatically and are calculated on your device. Nothing you type is sent to a server.

Runs in your browser. Processing happens entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to Delimiter.live.

How to use the HTML to Text Converter

  1. Paste or upload the HTML — a full document or a fragment both work.
  2. Turn on link URLs if you need to keep the targets rather than just the link text.
  3. Read the extracted text, then copy or download it.

Example

Input
<h1>Title</h1><ul><li>one</li></ul>
Output
Title

- one

Common use cases

  • Turning an HTML email into plain text for the text/plain alternative part.
  • Getting readable copy out of a scraped page for review or word counting.
  • Extracting article text without the navigation, scripts and styling.
  • Preparing content for a system that rejects markup.

Limitations and things to watch for

  • Structure is inferred from tags, not from a rendered layout. A page that relies on CSS for its visual order will come out in source order, which may not be the reading order.
  • Tables are flattened to lines rather than being drawn as text tables, because column alignment needs a width the converter cannot know.
  • Images are dropped entirely, including alt text. If you need the alt attributes, extract them separately.
  • This is not a sanitiser. It extracts text for reading; it does not produce safe HTML, because it produces no HTML at all.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the Text Cleaner?
The text cleaner strips tags as one of several tidying operations, leaving the words run together. This converter reads the markup structurally: headings and paragraphs become separated blocks, list items become bullets, and the result keeps its shape rather than collapsing into one run of text.
What happens to scripts and styles?
Their content is discarded entirely rather than being treated as text. Without that, a page's CSS rules and JavaScript source would appear in the middle of the extracted prose.
Are HTML entities decoded?
Yes. &amp;amp;, &amp;nbsp;, &amp;mdash; and the numeric forms such as &amp;#65; all become the characters they represent. An entity the converter does not recognise is left as written rather than being silently dropped.
Can I keep the link addresses?
Yes, with the link option on, which appends each target in brackets after the link text. In-page anchors starting with # are skipped, since they add noise without adding information.
Is my HTML uploaded?
No. Conversion runs entirely in your browser, so unpublished pages and internal documents stay on your device.

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