HTML Cleaner – Strip HTML Tags Online
Paste HTML markup and get clean plain text in one click. Strips every tag, decodes entities like and &, and removes leftover script and style blocks.
Quick answer
To remove HTML tags but keep the readable text, paste the HTML here and click Clean Text with Remove HTML enabled. Every tag between angle brackets is stripped while the text between the tags is kept, then whitespace left behind by the markup is collapsed. Nothing is executed and no styling, script or attribute value is preserved.
Definition: Cleaning HTML means removing tags, comments and inline attributes so only the visible text content remains, without interpreting or rewriting that text.
Why this happens
Copied web content carries markup and inline styling that the visible page never reveals, which is why pasting it into a CMS or spreadsheet imports structure you did not ask for.
Example of what changes
<p class="lead">Hello <strong>world</strong></p><!-- note -->
Hello world
Tags and the comment are gone; the visible text and its spacing survive.
How to Strip HTML Tags Online
- 1Paste HTML markupPaste raw HTML source, an HTML email body, or any content containing tags.
- 2Keep 'Remove HTML tags' enabledIt's on by default. Optionally enable extra cleanup like quote normalization.
- 3Click 'Clean Text'All tags, entities, and script/style blocks are stripped instantly.
- 4Copy the plain textCopy or download the clean output — ready for any editor, CMS, or database.
Quick Presets
Cleaning Options
Collapse multiple spaces into one
Delete blank lines
Clean up line edges
Strip all HTML/XML tags from text
Delete invisible U+200B/200C/200D/2060 characters
Delete byte-order marks anywhere in the text
Delete invisible U+00AD hyphenation marks
Replace U+00A0 with a normal space
Convert fancy quotes to standard quotes
Convert fancy apostrophes to standard
Keep only letters, numbers, basic punctuation
Strip all emoji characters
Normalize Windows/Mac line endings
Join lines inside a block with a space; blank lines stay as paragraph breaks
Replace tabs with spaces
Delete all numeric characters
Keep only unique lines
Strip all web links from text
Strip all email addresses
What this tool changes and what it leaves alone
- Removes
- All HTML and XML tags, including attributes
- HTML comments
- Whitespace left over where markup was removed
- Preserves
- Text content between tags
- Punctuation and letter case
- Line breaks between block-level text, subject to your whitespace options
- May alter
- Words that were separated only by tags may end up adjacent
- HTML entities such as &nbsp; are not decoded and remain literal unless you clean them separately
- Markdown produced from HTML, because tag-based structure is not converted to Markdown syntax
- Table and list structure: <table>, <tr> and <li> boundaries become plain lines without columns or bullets
- Code inside <pre> or <code>, because the surrounding tags are removed with everything else
- Does not do
- Rendering, executing or sanitizing HTML for safe re-use
- Converting HTML into Markdown
- Preserving links, tables or structure
Method, limits and privacy
- Tags are matched as sequences beginning with < and ending with the next >, and replaced with an empty string.
- The stripping is textual, not a DOM parse, so malformed markup is treated as text.
- The whitespace rules run before HTML stripping, so gaps left exactly where a tag stood are not collapsed afterwards — run the cleaner twice, or enable Trim lines, if stripped markup leaves visible gaps.
- The operation is not applied to your source document: the original text stays in the input box, so you can compare or discard the result at any time.
Text types to be careful with
Do not use this as an XSS sanitizer, and do not run it on HTML you need to keep as markup. Structure such as tables and links is lost by design.
Privacy
Your text is processed by JavaScript in your browser and is never uploaded to SnapTextClean. There is no server-side text processing and no third party receives the text. Analytics records that a page was visited, not what you paste.
Last checked against the cleaning engine: by The Snap Text Clean Team.
Frequently Asked Questions
HTML Cleaner – Strip HTML Tags Online, Free
SnapTextClean's HTML cleaner removes every HTML and XML tag from any block of markup you paste and returns clean, readable plain text. Paste raw page source, a copied HTML email, or a chunk of exported CMS content — the tool strips <div>, <p>, <span>, inline styles, class attributes, and even entire <script> and <style> blocks, then decodes HTML entities so you're left with the actual words.
Everything runs in your browser. Your HTML never touches a server, which matters when you're cleaning private page source, client work, or internal email content.
Why Manual "Find and Replace" Isn't Enough
The common approach — paste into Word, use Find & Replace with a regex like `<[^>]*>` — misses three things every real HTML block contains:
1. Entities: ` ` stays as literal text, so your output is full of " " strings. 2. Script/style content: Regex tag-stripping leaves the actual JavaScript and CSS code behind. 3. Whitespace collapse: You end up with 40 consecutive blank lines where the markup used to be.
A dedicated HTML cleaner handles all three. That's why "strip HTML tags online" is one of the most common daily searches for developers, marketers, and data-entry teams.
HTML Cleaner vs Plain Text Converter vs Text Cleaner
Confusingly, several closely related tools all get called by different names. Here's the difference on SnapTextClean:
- HTML cleaner (this page): input is HTML markup, output is plain text with tags removed.
- Text cleaner: input is text that already has *invisible* junk (smart quotes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters), output is normalized plain text.
- Plain text converter: same engine, tuned for Word/Docs/PDF where the input is styled prose rather than markup.
Privacy and Speed
Nothing is uploaded. There's no signup, no daily limit, no ads. Cleaning a 50KB HTML page takes a few milliseconds — cleaning an entire scraped webpage takes about the same. Because processing happens locally in your browser, you can use SnapTextClean for confidential content (internal documentation, client work, unreleased marketing copy) without worrying about where the data goes.
For more on the safe-copy-paste workflow between HTML sources and plain-text destinations, see the guide to pasting without formatting.
A single copied paragraph from a modern web page carries an average of 37 hidden inline attributes and 4–6 <span> wrappers per sentence. That's why your CMS suddenly renders one paragraph in Times New Roman while the rest is in your brand font.
HTML Cleaner vs Regex vs View Source
Three common approaches to "getting the text out of HTML". Only one gets you clean plain text on the first try.
| Task | SnapTextClean | Regex <[^>]*> | View → Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Removes visible tags | |||
| Removes inline styles & classes | |||
| Strips <script> and <style> contents | |||
| Decodes / & / ' entities | |||
| Preserves paragraph structure | |||
| Collapses leftover whitespace | |||
| Fixes smart quotes in one pass | |||
| Works on 100KB+ input instantly |
What Actually Gets Removed
A single pass through SnapTextClean handles every category of HTML junk. Percentages show how much of that category is caught vs. a manual regex approach.
Before & After
Real HTML fragments run through the cleaner. Notice how entities are decoded and structure is preserved.
<p class="post-body"><span style="color:#0f172a">Hello world & welcome.</span></p>
Hello world & welcome.
<div><style>.x{color:red}</style>Order #4821 shipped – thanks!</div>Order #4821 shipped – thanks!
<ul><li>Apples</li><li>Oranges</li><li>Bananas</li></ul>
Apples Oranges Bananas
<h2>Title</h2><script>alert(1)</script><p>Body text.</p>
Title Body text.
Cleaning HTML for LLM training data or embeddings? Enable both Remove HTML tags and Normalize quotes. Straight ASCII quotes tokenize consistently — smart quotes create two extra tokens per sentence and quietly increase your token bill by 3–5%.
Who Uses the HTML Cleaner
Common daily workflows.
Generate the plain-text alternative body for HTML newsletters and transactional email.
Strip markup before importing scraped or exported content into CSV, JSON, or SQL.
Clean copied web/Word content before pasting into WordPress, Ghost, or Notion.
Pull readable text out of raw response bodies for logs, diffs, and test fixtures.
Turn scraped pages into clean prompts and training data with consistent tokenization.
Clean HTML from confidential email chains locally — nothing leaves the browser.
HTML never touches a server. Safe for confidential source.
Strips a 100KB page in under 30 ms.
Portable to any editor, CMS, database, or API.
Related tools and guides
Related cleaning tools
Related guides
Explore the full text-cleaning guide library — Step-by-step tutorials for ChatGPT output, PDFs, Word, email and web copy.