Plain Text Converter — Strip HTML, Markdown & Unicode Formatting Instantly
This plain text converter strips every formatting layer from pasted content — HTML tags, Markdown asterisks, Word's rich text encoding, CMS-specific markup — and gives back clean readable prose with none of the artifacts. The words survive; only the format layer is removed. Paste from a website, Word doc, Markdown editor, or old CMS and get copy that's ready to paste anywhere without breaking the destination's formatting. No signup, no character limit.
What Is Plain Text Converter?
A plain text converter strips formatting markup from your text — HTML tags, markdown syntax, rich text formatting — and returns clean, readable prose with no encoding artifacts. Where Remove Special Characters strips individual non-alphanumeric characters and Remove Punctuation strips sentence marks, Plain Text Converter is about removing structural formatting that was added by a tool, editor, or document system — not naturally occurring characters. The output reads as normal text with the words and sentences intact.
This tool is essential in content migration workflows. Text copied from a website often carries invisible HTML. Content drafted in Markdown contains asterisks and hashes that are formatting instructions, not content. Word documents pasted into a CMS often bring RTF formatting that doesn't translate. Plain text conversion removes the format layer, leaving clean content that you can re-format in your destination system from scratch. Use it when you need raw text content stripped of its source system's formatting — not when you need to remove specific character types from natural text.
𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸 **World**!→Hello World!Before & After: Plain Text Converter Examples
Real input → output pairs showing exactly what this tool does to your text.
| Input | Plain Text Converter Output |
|---|---|
**Bold text** and _italic_ | Bold text and italic |
<p>Hello <strong>World</strong></p> | Hello World |
# Heading
Paragraph text | Heading
Paragraph text |
[Click here](https://example.com) | Click here |
Smith & Jones Inc. | Smith & Jones Inc. |
Key Features
Removes angle-bracket HTML tags, Markdown syntax (**, #, [], `), and rich-text paste artifacts in a single pass — the equivalent of Python BeautifulSoup's soup.get_text(separator=" ") plus a Markdown-stripping step, combined into one browser-based tool.
Converts &, , <, >, " and other HTML entities to their readable characters — the step that Strip HTML Tags alone skips. RFC 2045/2046 email plain-text parts require entity decoding to be human-readable.
Collapses multiple blank lines, strips bullet character remnants (• ‣ ◦), and normalizes Word/Google Docs paste whitespace — producing clean prose rather than raw stripped source that still looks broken.
Designed for content migration and reuse workflows. For sanitizing user input against XSS and script injection in web apps, use DOMPurify (JavaScript) or bleach (Python) — they enforce an allowlist, not just tag removal.
When to Use Plain Text Converter
Use when pasting AI-generated text, social media posts with fancy fonts, Word/Google Docs content, or any text that carries hidden formatting you want to remove.
Strips Unicode bold, italic, cursive, bubble, double-struck, small-caps, and fullwidth text back to plain ASCII — plus HTML tags, Markdown, curly quotes, em dashes, and invisible zero-width characters.
Who Should Use This Tool?
Strip HTML and rich-text formatting from legacy content before re-importing to a new CMS — get clean prose without stray tags or markup artifacts.
Convert Markdown-formatted documentation or README content to plain text for use in systems that don't support markdown rendering.
Extract plain-text versions from HTML email templates for plain-text fallback emails, accessibility compliance, and A/B testing.
Key Use Cases
- →Strip HTML tags from web-scraped or copy-pasted content before importing to a CMS that expects plain text input.
- →Convert Markdown documentation to plain text for use in an email body, PDF generation, or a system that doesn't render markdown.
- →Clean up Word or Google Docs copy-paste that arrives with hidden RTF formatting codes in text fields.
- →Extract readable plain text from HTML email templates to create the plain-text alternative required by email standards.
- →Prepare legacy website content for re-publication by stripping old HTML formatting before applying new styles.
Plain Text Converter vs Other Formats
How this tool compares to related approaches and methods
| Method / Format | Best For |
|---|---|
| THISPlain Text Converter (this tool) | Full content de-formatting: HTML + Markdown + entity decoding + whitespace normalization |
| Strip HTML Tags | Tag removal only — does not decode entities or handle Markdown |
| Remove Special Characters | Stripping individual non-alphanumeric chars from already-plain text |
| DOMPurify / bleach | Security sanitization: allowlist-based HTML cleaning for web app user input |
Plain Text Converter Rules: How It Works
- →HTML markup:
, ,
, ,
, etc.- →Markdown syntax: **bold**, # headings, [link](url), `code`
- →Rich text encoding artifacts from Word or Google Docs paste
- →HTML entities (& ) decoded to readable characters
✗ What Survives- ×All natural-language content: words, sentences, paragraphs
- ×Standard punctuation and numbers
- ×For security sanitization use DOMPurify — this is for content workflows only
- ×Different from Remove Special Characters (keeps punctuation) and Strip HTML Tags (entities survive)
How to Use Plain Text Converter
- Paste or type your text into the Input Text box.
- The result appears instantly on the right.
- Click Copy to copy the output to your clipboard.
- Click Clear to reset and process new text.
This Converter vs Manual Methods
Why use this tool instead of doing it by hand?
| Method | Limitation |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+A, paste into Notepad/TextEdit | Leaves HTML entities (&) and some Markdown artifacts; clipboard behavior varies by OS |
| Python BeautifulSoup soup.get_text() | Requires Python + beautifulsoup4; doesn't handle Markdown or entity decoding alone |
| JavaScript el.textContent or el.innerText | Requires a DOM context; doesn't handle Markdown; becomes space only in innerText |
| VS Code "Paste Without Formatting" + regex cleanup | Still leaves Markdown syntax; requires multiple regex passes for full cleanup |
| ✓ BESTThis converter | None |
Common Mistakes & Pro Tips
- !Expecting plain text conversion to fix all formatting issues — it removes the markup but may leave HTML entities (&, ) that need a separate entity-decoding step for fully clean output.
- !Using this to strip individual characters from natural text — Plain Text Converter is for removing formatting systems (HTML, markdown, RTF). If you need to remove punctuation, symbols, or special characters from plain text that has no formatting, use the dedicated Remove Punctuation or Remove Special Characters tools instead.
- !Treating plain text conversion as a security sanitizer — removing HTML tags makes content look safe for display, but a content-stripping tool doesn't implement a security allowlist. A simple tag-stripping approach can miss obfuscated injection patterns. For user-generated HTML in web apps, use DOMPurify (JavaScript) or bleach (Python) which enforce allowlists and are maintained against known XSS bypass techniques per the OWASP XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Plain Text Converter
What is the difference between plain text conversion and stripping HTML tags?
+
Strip HTML Tags is a focused operation: it removes angle-bracket HTML elements while preserving all other characters, including HTML entities like & and . Plain Text Converter is a broader conversion: it aims to produce fully readable prose by both stripping tags AND decoding HTML entities, handling markdown syntax, and normalizing whitespace artifacts left by document systems. Strip HTML Tags is one step of the plain text conversion process.
Does plain text conversion remove formatting from Word or Google Docs?
+
When you paste from Word or Google Docs into a plain-text tool, the pasted content is already partially de-formatted — the clipboard typically strips visual styles but may preserve structural elements like line breaks and list markers. Plain text conversion normalizes the remaining artifacts: extra line breaks, bullet characters (• ‣ ◦), dash-based list markers, and special typography characters (curly quotes, em dashes) that survive the paste.
What happens to links when converting to plain text?
+
HTML links (<a href="url">link text</a>) are typically converted to just the link text when tags are stripped. The URL is lost unless the tool is configured to output link text followed by the URL in parentheses or brackets. For content where links matter, note down important URLs before converting to plain text, since the hyperlink data is embedded in the HTML and removed with the tag stripping.
How is plain text different from markdown?
+
Plain text contains no formatting instructions at all — just words, spaces, and punctuation. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that uses characters like *, #, _, and [] as formatting shorthand that renders as bold, headings, italic, and links when processed by a markdown renderer. A plain text converter strips markdown syntax so the output contains only the content words, without the asterisks, hashes, and brackets used to encode formatting.
What should I do after converting to plain text if I still see entities like &?
+
HTML entities are text-level character references (& = &, < = <, = non-breaking space, " = ") that survive tag stripping. After plain text conversion, run the output through an HTML Entity Decode step to replace entities with their actual characters. Our HTML Encode/Decode tool handles entity decoding.
What is the RFC 2045 requirement for plain-text email alternatives?
+
RFC 2045 and RFC 2046 define the MIME multipart/alternative format used by HTML email: each email should include a text/plain part alongside the text/html part. The plain-text part must be human-readable without any markup — no HTML tags, no Markdown, no encoded entities. Email clients like Gmail display the plain-text part to users on text-only devices and as the preview snippet. Mailchimp and Klaviyo both auto-generate a plain-text version from HTML, but the auto-generated version often has markup artifacts — using a plain text converter to manually clean the content produces a better result.
How do I strip HTML and convert to plain text in Python and JavaScript?
+
Python (recommended): from bs4 import BeautifulSoup; text = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser").get_text(separator=" ") — handles tags, entities, and whitespace. For Markdown: pip install markdownify; from markdownify import markdownify; plain = markdownify(html). JavaScript (browser): const el = document.createElement("div"); el.innerHTML = html; const text = el.innerText — uses the browser's own parser. Node.js: use the he library for entity decoding (he.decode(stripped)) plus a regex tag-strip. For security-sensitive contexts, none of these replace DOMPurify (browser) or bleach (Python) for allowlist-based sanitization.