How to Convert HTML to Plain Text Without Executing It
Extract readable text from HTML while handling entities, paragraphs, scripts, styles, and missing content.
HTML-to-text conversion is useful for cleaning copied content, preparing search snippets, or inspecting the words inside an email template. A useful converter interprets markup structure and character references. Removing everything between angle brackets with a regular expression cannot reliably reproduce that behavior.
Parse markup in an inert document
Use an HTML parser rather than rendering the supplied markup in the application. Our tool parses a separate document and removes script, style, template, and noscript elements before extracting text. It adds line breaks for common block elements and decodes entities through parsing. It never inserts the supplied HTML into the visible page. Extracted text is displayed as text, not interpreted as markup.
Decide what readable means
A paragraph break, table separator, image alternative, and hyperlink destination are different kinds of information. Our extractor keeps common line boundaries and table-cell separation but does not append link destinations or image alt text. It also does not compute external CSS visibility. If your downstream workflow needs those features, define a richer extraction policy rather than assuming any plain-text converter preserves them.
Keep extraction separate from sanitization
Plain text can be safely displayed through a text node, but converting HTML to text does not produce sanitized HTML. If the result is later inserted into HTML source by string concatenation, it must still be escaped for that context. For production email, maintain a deliberate plain-text alternative and review it for links, reading order, and calls to action. Automatically extracted output is a draft, not a full substitute for that review.
Worked example
<h2>News</h2><p>Tom & Ada</p>
News
Tom & AdaCan I use the output as sanitized HTML?
No. It is plain text. Escape it appropriately if another system later embeds it into HTML.
Reference and further reading
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