HTML to Text Converter
Remove every tag from pasted HTML and get the readable text, with character and word counts side by side.
- Plain text chars
- 0
- HTML chars
- 0
- Words
- 0
Runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded.
What it does
Copying content out of a CMS, an email template or page source usually drags markup along with it. This converter parses pasted HTML with the browser's own parser and returns only the text content, so tags disappear and entities such as & and become the characters they stand for.
Three stats show plain text characters, the original HTML character count and a word count, which makes it easy to see how much of a page is real copy. Writers use it to reuse content in plain text emails or social posts, and SEOs use it to feed clean text into word count, readability or keyword density checks.
How to use it
- 1
Paste the markup into HTML input.
- 2
Read Plain text chars, HTML chars and Words in the stat row.
- 3
Review the result in the Plain text panel.
- 4
Click Copy plain text to take the clean version.
What you get
The decoded text content of your HTML in a Plain text panel, three counts (plain text characters, HTML characters and words split on whitespace) and a Copy plain text button.
When to use it
- Counting words in real copy
- Paste a page body to count only the words a reader sees, without tag names and attributes inflating the total.
- Moving rich text to plain fields
- Clean up formatted content before pasting it into app store descriptions, social bios or plain text email.
- Prepping text for other checks
- Strip markup first so readability and keyword density tools analyze sentences instead of code.
- Measuring markup overhead
- Compare HTML chars with Plain text chars to see how much of an exported article is markup.
Example
Input
<h2>Hours</h2><p>Tea & cake served <strong>daily</strong>.</p>
Output
Plain text: HoursTea & cake served daily. Plain text chars: 29 | HTML chars: 66 | Words: 5
Block tags written with no whitespace between them are joined with no space, which is why Hours and Tea run together.
Tips
- Paste pretty-printed HTML with line breaks between blocks if you want separate lines in the output. Spacing comes from whitespace in the source, not from p or br tags.
- Delete script and style blocks before pasting, because their code is treated as text and ends up in the output and the word count.
- Link URLs and image alt text are dropped, since only visible text nodes are kept. Copy those separately if you need them.
Questions
Why are my headings and paragraphs stuck together in the plain text?
The converter keeps the whitespace that exists in the source and does not add breaks for block tags. When tags sit directly next to each other, their text joins up. Add line breaks between elements before pasting.
Are entities like and & turned into normal characters?
Yes. The browser decodes them, so & becomes & and becomes a non-breaking space that looks like an ordinary space in the output.
Does the word count include code from script tags?
Yes, if a script or style block is in what you paste. Its contents are treated as text, so remove those blocks first for an accurate count.
Can it keep the link addresses next to the anchor text?
No. Only the visible anchor text survives, and href values are discarded. Use the Broken Link Syntax Checker if you need a list of the absolute URLs in the HTML.