Remove HTML Tags - Online Strip Code Cleaner

An HTML tag remover (also called an HTML stripper or code cleaner) is a tool that extracts plain text from HTML code by removing all HTML tags, attributes, and markup. It's useful when you need to get readable content from raw HTML — for example, when scraping web pages, preparing plain-text emails, cleaning data for analysis, or migrating content between platforms. Our tool goes further by also decoding HTML entities, handling line breaks intelligently, and removing unnecessary whitespace.

Simply paste your HTML code into the input box above, configure your cleaning options (such as decoding entities or preserving line breaks), and click the "Remove HTML Tags" button. The cleaned plain text instantly appears in the output box. You can then copy it to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file. No installation, no sign-up — everything runs right in your browser.

The tool uses regular expressions to identify and remove HTML tags. First, it optionally removes <script> and <style> blocks entirely (including their content). Then it converts structural tags like <br> and </p> into line breaks to preserve readability. After that, all remaining HTML tags are stripped using pattern matching. Finally, optional post-processing steps decode HTML entities, collapse extra whitespace, and remove blank lines — giving you clean, human-readable text.

Yes! Our tool includes a "Convert <br> & paragraphs to line breaks" option (enabled by default). When checked, <br> tags become single line breaks, and closing paragraph tags (</p>) become double line breaks to maintain paragraph separation. This ensures the cleaned text retains its original structure and is much easier to read, rather than becoming one long unbroken block.

HTML entities are special character sequences used in HTML to represent reserved characters. Common examples include & (for &), < (for <), > (for >), " (for "), ' (for '), and   (for non-breaking space). After stripping HTML tags, these entity codes remain as-is, making text hard to read. Enabling "Decode HTML entities" converts them back to their normal characters, producing truly clean, readable text.

In JavaScript, you can remove HTML tags using several methods. The simplest is str.replace(/<[^>]*>/g, ''). For safer handling (especially with complex HTML), you can use the DOM: create a temporary element, set innerHTML, then read textContent. Example:
const div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = htmlString;
const cleanText = div.textContent;
Our online tool implements both approaches with additional options for entity decoding and whitespace management, saving you from writing code.

In Python, the most popular approach is using BeautifulSoup:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
clean_text = soup.get_text()
For simpler cases without external libraries, you can use re.sub(r'<[^>]*>', '', html) from Python's re module. However, regex-based stripping may miss edge cases like nested tags or script blocks. Our online tool provides a convenient alternative — no coding required, with instant results and additional cleaning options.

If you have cells containing HTML-formatted text in Excel or Google Sheets, you can clean them using our tool by pasting the HTML content, stripping it, and pasting the result back. In Google Sheets, you can also use the =REGEXREPLACE(A1, "<[^>]*>", "") formula. In Excel, similar functionality is available through Power Query or VBA. For bulk cleaning, our online tool is ideal — just paste, strip, copy, and you're done.

No. Simply removing HTML tags is not sufficient for preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Attackers can use various evasion techniques such as malformed tags, encoded characters, or event handlers in unexpected places. For proper XSS prevention, you should use a dedicated sanitization library (like DOMPurify for JavaScript, Bleach for Python, or OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer) that understands the full HTML specification and whitelists safe elements. Our tool is designed for text extraction and cleaning, not security sanitization.

innerText (JavaScript) and textContent are DOM properties that return the visible text of an element, automatically excluding HTML tags. While they produce clean text, they require a valid DOM context and browser environment. Our regex-based stripping works on any plain text containing HTML markup, without needing a browser DOM. It also offers finer control: you can choose whether to decode entities, preserve line breaks, or collapse whitespace — options that innerText handles automatically but without customization.

For plain text emails, you need to convert HTML content into readable plain text. Our tool is perfect for this: paste your HTML email template, enable "Convert <br> & paragraphs to line breaks" and "Decode HTML entities", then strip the tags. For best results, also enable "Collapse extra spaces" and "Remove empty lines" to produce a tight, professional plain-text version. The output maintains the logical structure while being fully compatible with plain-text email clients.

Our tool currently removes all HTML tags to produce completely clean plain text. If you need to selectively remove only certain tags (e.g., strip <span> but keep <p>), you might need a more specialized HTML manipulation tool or write custom regex. However, our "Remove <script> & <style> blocks" option does provide selective removal for those specific security- and styling-related tags, which is a common requirement when cleaning user-submitted content.