Text/Clean

Strip HTML tags

Removes HTML tags and restores paragraph and line break structure and entities like & as text.

Example

  • Options used
  • Default options
Input
<h2>Notice</h2><p>Price: 5&nbsp;&euro; &amp; free shipping</p><script>track()</script><ul><li>Fast</li><li>Safe</li></ul>
Output
Notice

Price: 5⍽€ & free shipping

Fast

Safe

Symbols in examples: ⇥ tab · · trailing space · ⍽ NBSP · □ full-width space · ◌ zero-width character

Open this operation in the tool

What it does

Removes tags such as <p> and <a href=…> from HTML source, or from content copied from an editor's HTML view, and keeps only the text.

Processing order

  1. Removes comments <!-- --> and <script>, <style>, <noscript> and <template> elements together with their content. If only the tags were removed, the JavaScript code would remain as if it were body text.
  2. If 'Turn block tags and <br> into line breaks' is on, <br> and the boundaries of block elements such as p, div, h1–h6, li and tr become line breaks, and the ends of table cells (</td>, </th>) become tabs. As a result, copied tables become tab-separated text that pastes neatly into Excel.
  3. Removes all remaining tags.
  4. If 'Decode entities like &amp;' is on, named entities such as &amp; &lt; &nbsp; &hellip; and numeric entities such as &#39; &#x27; are converted into the actual characters. Unknown named entities are left as they are.
  5. Reduces runs of blank lines to at most one.

Limitations

It does not interpret CSS like a browser does, so the text of elements hidden on screen remains. Malformed HTML with a > inside an attribute value may leave some fragments behind.

&nbsp; becomes an NBSP character, so adding Clean invisible characters and quotes after this step turns it into an ordinary space. The built-in recipe 'HTML → plain text' uses exactly this combination.