HTML to Plain Text Converter

About this tool

Product feeds, supplier spreadsheets and CMS exports are full of HTML that nobody wants to read. This converter takes that markup and gives you readable plain text, keeping the structure of the original by turning line break tags and block level tags into real line breaks rather than running everything into one paragraph.

What it does

• Converts br, p, li, div, tr and heading tags into line breaks
• Removes every remaining tag, including unclosed and malformed ones
• Deletes script and style blocks along with their contents
• Decodes HTML entities such as ampersand, non breaking space and curly quotes
• Repairs mojibake, the garbled characters you get when UTF-8 text is read as Windows-1252
• Removes control characters, zero width spaces and byte order marks
• Strips leading bullet glyphs so each item starts with its own text
• Strips registered, trademark and copyright symbols
• Trims trailing spaces and collapses runs of empty lines

What is mojibake

When text saved as UTF-8 is read as Windows-1252, punctuation turns into nonsense: an apostrophe becomes three odd characters, an en dash becomes something similar, and a registered symbol picks up a stray capital A. This tool recognises the common patterns and puts the correct character back. Where a character has already been destroyed and replaced with the black diamond question mark, it cannot be recovered, so the tool makes a sensible substitution: if it sits between two numbers, as in a year range, it becomes a spaced hyphen.

Privacy

Everything runs in JavaScript inside your own browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged or stored anywhere.