Markdown to Plain Text
Strip Markdown formatting to get clean, readable plain text.
Characters: 0Words: 0
Stripping Markdown to plain text
This tool removes Markdown syntax — headings, bold and italic markers, links and images (keeping their visible text), inline and fenced code, blockquotes, list bullets, and table pipes — leaving clean prose you can drop into an email, a CMS field, or a word-count tool. It is the inverse of writing Markdown: instead of rendering to HTML, it reduces everything to readable text.
Want rendered HTML instead? Use the Markdown to HTML converter. To analyze the result, try the word counter or reading time calculator. Everything runs in your browser.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Getting a clean word count from a document written in Markdown.
- Producing plain text for a channel that renders no formatting.
- Extracting prose from a README for a description field.
- Stripping syntax before running a readability or spelling check.
- Comparing two documents' words without the markup noise.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why strip Markdown rather than render it?
- For contexts that show raw text: search index snippets, meta descriptions, plain-text email, social previews and reading-time estimates. Leaving the syntax in means users see literal asterisks and brackets.
- What happens to link syntax?
- The link TEXT is kept and the URL dropped, so [click here](https://…) becomes "click here". That is right for a preview snippet and wrong for a plain-text email, where the address is the only way to follow the link.
- Are code blocks preserved?
- Their content is, but the fences and indentation markers go. That can make code unreadable and, worse, indistinguishable from prose — which is why extraction tools usually drop code blocks entirely from a summary.
- How is the frontmatter handled?
- YAML frontmatter between --- markers must be removed first, or the title, tags and dates end up in the body text. Forgetting this is the commonest cause of odd metadata appearing in search snippets.
- What about embedded HTML?
- Markdown permits raw HTML, so stripping Markdown syntax alone leaves the tags behind. A complete conversion must handle both syntaxes, which is why a naive regex over the Markdown is not enough.
- What should happen to a table when Markdown is stripped?
- It has to become something readable — aligned columns or one line per row. Removing the pipes alone runs the cells together, which is the most common way a stripped table becomes unreadable.
- Are reference-style links resolved?
- They should be, or the text keeps a bare `[label][ref]` and the URL is orphaned at the bottom. Inline links degrade gracefully; reference links do not, which is a reason to resolve before stripping.
Common errors and gotchas
- Losing link text or targets, where one of the two is usually the part you needed.
- Stripping code fences and running the code into the prose.
- Leaving list markers behind, so the text keeps dashes and numbers without the structure.
- Dropping table content entirely rather than flattening it into readable lines.
- Removing emphasis markers inside a word, which can join two words together.
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