Text Cleaning

Strip HTML Tags

Q: Will stripping tags preserve line breaks?

Block-level HTML elements like , , , – , and create visual spacing in rendered HTML. When the tags are stripped, that spacing is lost unless the tool inserts newline characters where block elements were. Some strip tools convert block-closing tags to newlines; others simply remove the tags. Review your output for paragraph spacing after stripping.

Remove all HTML tags from text and decode HTML entities, leaving only the readable plain text content.

Input Text

0 words0 chars

Output Text

What Is Strip HTML Tags?

An HTML tag stripper removes all HTML markup from your text, leaving only the visible plain-text content. Pasting HTML source code, email HTML templates, or web-scraped content into a text field often reveals raw markup —

, ,

, ,
— that clutters the readable text. This tool strips every tag while preserving the text content between them, giving you clean prose without HTML knowledge or manual editing.
HTML stripping is a fundamental step in content migration workflows, email processing, and web scraping pipelines. When you copy product descriptions from an old website to a new one, the source may be HTML but the destination wants plain text. When processing customer emails for analysis, HTML boilerplate needs to be removed before text analysis can begin. When extracting article text from web-scraped HTML, all surrounding markup needs to be stripped to access the prose content.

Example
<p>Hello <b>World</b>!</p>→Hello World!

Who Should Use This Tool?

Content Managers & Migrators

Strip HTML from legacy CMS content before migrating to a new platform — extract clean text from old HTML-formatted product descriptions and articles.

Email Marketers & Analysts

Extract plain text from HTML email templates for analysis, A/B testing text versions, or converting rich emails to plain-text fallbacks.

Web Scrapers & Data Extractors

Remove HTML markup from scraped webpage content to access clean prose text for analysis, training data preparation, or content reuse.

Key Use Cases

→Extract plain text from product description HTML for importing to a new e-commerce platform that accepts only plain text.
→Convert HTML email templates to plain-text versions required by email clients that don't render HTML.
→Clean web-scraped HTML content by stripping all markup to access the article body text for content analysis.
→Prepare HTML-formatted user-generated content for sentiment analysis or NLP by removing all tags first.
→Strip HTML from legacy blog post backups before importing to a modern CMS with its own rich text editor.

How to Use Strip HTML Tags

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.

Common Mistakes & Pro Tips

!Stripping HTML without decoding HTML entities — after tag removal, text like "Smith & Jones" still contains & which should be decoded to "&". Always run HTML entity decode after tag stripping for fully clean plain text.
!Stripping tags from content where formatting carries meaning — ordered lists, tables, and heading hierarchy encode information in their structure. Stripping tags removes this structure, potentially making the output less informative than the original.

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about Strip HTML Tags

Does stripping HTML tags also remove inline styles and scripts?

Yes — HTML tag stripping removes everything inside angle brackets, including <style> blocks, <script> tags, inline style attributes, event handlers (onclick, onload), and all other HTML elements and attributes. Only the text content between tags is preserved. This makes it useful for security-sensitive contexts where you need to ensure no executable HTML code survives in the output.

What happens to HTML entities like & and  ?

HTML tag stripping removes angle-bracket tags but leaves HTML character entities (like & for &, < for <,   for a non-breaking space) intact. These are text-level character references, not tags, so they survive tag removal. To fully convert to plain text, you need to also decode HTML entities. Our HTML Encode/Decode tool handles entity decoding after you've stripped the tags.

Will stripping tags preserve line breaks?

Block-level HTML elements like <p>, <div>, <br>, <h1>–<h6>, and <li> create visual spacing in rendered HTML. When the tags are stripped, that spacing is lost unless the tool inserts newline characters where block elements were. Some strip tools convert block-closing tags to newlines; others simply remove the tags. Review your output for paragraph spacing after stripping.

Is this tool safe for sanitizing user input in a web app?

This tool provides convenient text extraction for content workflows — it is NOT suitable as a security sanitizer for web applications. For security contexts (preventing XSS in user-generated content), use a server-side HTML sanitization library: DOMPurify (JavaScript), bleach (Python), HTML Purifier (PHP). These handle edge cases, malformed HTML, and encoding tricks that a simple tag-regex remover misses.

What is the difference between stripping and sanitizing HTML?

Stripping removes ALL HTML tags, leaving only text content. Sanitizing selectively removes or encodes dangerous tags and attributes while preserving safe formatting markup like <b>, <em>, and <p>. Strip when you want plain text only. Sanitize when you want to allow some HTML formatting while blocking scripts, iframes, and event handlers. Both serve different use cases in content and security workflows.

Related Tools

HTML Encode / Decode
Convert special HTML characters to entities (&, <, >) or decode them back to text.
Remove Special Characters
Strip symbols, emoji, and non-standard characters, keeping only letters, numbers, and basic punctuation.
Remove Line Breaks
Join all lines into a single paragraph by removing all line breaks.
Find & Replace
Find every occurrence of a word or phrase and replace it with something else.

Last reviewed: August 2026

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