What does the Strip HTML Tags tool do?

It removes all HTML markup from text — opening and closing tags, attributes, comments, and blocks — and returns only the visible text content. All processing happens in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.

Does it decode HTML entities like & and €?

Yes. When the 'Decode entities' option is on (default), it decodes both named entities (&, ©, —, ) and numeric references (€, €). Turn the option off to keep entities literal.

Will line breaks be preserved?

By default yes. and block-level closing tags ( , , , ...) become newlines so the output reads naturally. Disable 'Preserve line breaks' to collapse everything to a single space-separated line.

Are and contents removed?

Yes — by default both are stripped entirely along with their contents, so you don't end up with stray CSS or JavaScript in the plain-text output. Both behaviors can be toggled individually.

Strip HTML Tags

10 tags removed245 chars stripped

Preserve line breaks

Decode entities

Remove scripts

Remove styles

HTML Input

Plain Text Output

Welcome to DevToys Web Pro

  This is a sample paragraph with a link.

    List item one

    List item two & more

  Special entities: © ™ — … €

Technical details

How the Strip HTML Tags Tool Works

What the Tool Does

Strip HTML Tags removes all HTML markup from text and returns the visible content as plain text. It handles opening and closing tags, attributes, self-closing tags, comments, and nested structures. Optional behaviors include decoding common HTML entities (&, ©, €), preserving line breaks at block-level tags and br elements, and stripping script and style blocks entirely so their contents don't leak into the output.

Common Developer Use Cases

Use Strip HTML Tags to convert rich-text email or CMS content to plain text for SMS digests, sanitize scraped HTML before storing it in a search index, extract the readable content of an article for summarization, or clean up clipboard data after copying from a rendered web page. It also helps when preparing test fixtures from production HTML pages where only the textual content matters.

Data Formats, Types, or Variants

Input is any HTML or XML-flavored markup; output is plain UTF-8 text. Numeric entity references like € and € are decoded to their Unicode characters, and a wide set of named entities (&, <, >, ", ',  , ©, ®, ™, …, —, –, smart quotes) is supported. When line-break preservation is on, closing tags for p, div, li, h1–h6, br, and other block-level elements become newlines and consecutive blank lines collapse to a single blank line.

Common Pitfalls and Edge Cases

Regex-based HTML stripping is not a substitute for a real HTML parser when dealing with malicious input — it should not be used to sanitize untrusted HTML before reinjecting it elsewhere. Malformed markup with mismatched tags may produce surprising whitespace. Embedded base64 images, scripts containing strings that look like tags, and CDATA sections all have edge cases. For server-side production sanitization use a battle-tested library such as DOMPurify, sanitize-html, or bleach instead.

When to Use This Tool vs Code

Use this browser tool when you need a one-shot conversion of a chunk of HTML to plain text — e.g. cleaning a scraped page or a copied email body. In application code, prefer purpose-built libraries: DOMPurify for sanitization, html-to-text or htmlparser2 for structured text extraction, and Cheerio or jsdom when you need to walk the DOM. These libraries handle edge cases such as nested tables, encoding declarations, and conditional comments more robustly than a regex pass.