Remove HTML Tags

What this tool is used for

• Getting the text out of a markup fragment that was never a whole document.
• Getting the words out of markup for a word count.
• Cleaning content pasted from a web page into a plain field.
• Producing a plain-text version of an HTML fragment.
• Reducing markup to text so two versions can be diffed on content.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is stripping tags with a regex safe?

Not for security. A regex cannot parse HTML reliably — comments, CDATA, attributes containing angle brackets and malformed markup all defeat it. For sanitising untrusted input use a real parser such as DOMPurify; regex stripping is for trusted content only.

What happens to script and style content?

Naive stripping removes the tags but leaves the JavaScript or CSS TEXT behind, dumping code into your output. Correct extraction removes those elements entirely, contents included, before taking the remaining text.

Are HTML entities decoded?

They need to be, or you get literal & and   in the result. Note   should become a normal space, not be deleted — it is a space character, and dropping it joins words together.

Is block structure preserved?

Only if the converter inserts breaks. Removing tags blindly turns </p><p> into nothing, running paragraphs together into one wall of text. Block-level elements should become newlines to keep the text readable.

How is this different from an HTML-to-Markdown converter?

This discards all formatting; Markdown conversion PRESERVES it in plain-text form, keeping headings, links, bold and lists. Use tag stripping when you want only the words, and Markdown conversion when structure still matters.

What happens to comments and conditional comments?

They should be removed with their contents, since none of it is visible text. A stripper that only matches `<tag>` patterns leaves the comment body behind as stray text, which is a common artefact.

Are `<br>` and `<p>` turned into line breaks?

They need to be, or the output becomes one run-on paragraph. Removing tags without substituting whitespace also joins words across block boundaries, turning `<li>one</li><li>two</li>` into `onetwo`.

Is the result safe to display?

Safer, but not automatically safe — if the output is re-inserted into a page, any remaining entities can still be interpreted. Escaping on output is what makes it safe; stripping tags on input is not a substitute.

Common errors and gotchas

• Leaving script and style contents behind as text, because only the tags were removed.
• Losing structure entirely, so headings and list items run into one block.
• Leaving HTML entities undecoded, so the output contains ampersand sequences.
• Using tag stripping as XSS protection, which it is not.
• Collapsing whitespace inside a preformatted block where it mattered.