How to Strip HTML Tags From Text

HTML uses tags, written inside angle brackets like a paragraph tag or a bold tag, to describe how text should look and behave in a browser. When you copy content from a web page or export it from a rich editor, that markup often comes along invisibly. Stripping HTML means removing every tag so that only the readable text remains.

A proper strip parses the markup rather than blindly deleting angle brackets, so it correctly handles nested tags, attributes, and self-closing elements. The goal is plain text: the words a reader sees, with all the structural and styling code taken out.

Not everything between tags is visible text. HTML documents often contain script blocks that hold JavaScript and style blocks that hold CSS rules. If you only removed the tags but kept the content inside these blocks, your clean text would be polluted with code and styling instructions that were never meant to be read.

For that reason, a reliable HTML stripper drops the entire contents of script and style elements, not just their surrounding tags. It also collapses the leftover whitespace so you are not left with long runs of blank lines where formatting elements used to be. The result reads like the original article, minus the machinery.

The HTML Stripper takes tag-heavy input and returns clean plain text in your browser, so nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere. It is ideal for cleaning up content pulled from a page, an email export, or a content management system.

Plain text is the safest format when you need content to behave predictably. Pasting stripped text into a form field avoids broken layouts, hidden tracking, and mismatched fonts. Writers use it to reset formatting before repasting into a document, and developers use it to extract readable content from scraped or exported pages.

If you later need the words counted or reformatted, plain text is the right starting point. Because it carries no markup, it moves cleanly between apps and never surprises you with leftover styling from wherever it came from.