HTML tag stripper

HTML tag stripper

What the HTML tag stripper does

This app is built for raw markup: view-source dumps, scraped pages, feed exports, the stuff that's clearly HTML rather than text that merely picked up some formatting on the way in. It removes every tag and every attribute inside it, drops script and style blocks entirely, and decodes the handful of entities that show up most often.

It's local. The strip runs in your browser rather than on a server, so nothing you paste is uploaded or logged, and there's no cap on how much source you throw at it.

That matters for scraped content especially, since it's often not yours to begin with and often not something you want sitting on someone else's server just because you needed the tags off it.

Workflow

How to strip HTML tags from source in three steps

No build step, no configuration.

Step 1

Paste the raw HTML source into the box.

Step 2

Press Strip HTML. It processes instantly, on your device.

Step 3

Copy the plain text and feed it into whatever's next.

The breakdown

Tags, attributes, script blocks: what each one becomes

Three different things live inside typical markup, and this tool handles them differently under the hood, though the net result is the same: they all disappear. Every tag, opening and closing, goes. Every attribute inside a tag, class, id, inline style, every data attribute and href, goes with it, since none of that ever rendered as visible text anyway.

Script and style blocks get removed whole, tags and contents together, because JavaScript and CSS were never text meant for a reader. Strip a page that's mostly boilerplate and analytics scripts and you can end up with a surprisingly small amount of actual content, which is often the point of running this in the first place.

Entities

What gets decoded, and what's left as-is

An entity is a character spelled out in code, because the literal character would be ambiguous inside markup: & for an ampersand, < and > for the brackets a real less-than or greater-than sign would be mistaken for.

This app decodes four of them automatically:  , &, < and >, which covers the bulk of what turns up in ordinary source. Numeric entities like ’ and named ones like © or — are left exactly as they were typed, since there's no complete, fixed list of every entity a source page might use. Scan the output if your source leaned on typographic punctuation this way.

The honest limit

A regex-based stripper, not a validating HTML parser

This is pattern matching, not a document tree the way a browser builds one. On well-formed HTML the result is the same either way. On broken markup, or on plain text that happens to contain a stray angle bracket used for a comparison, a regex pass can behave differently from a full parser. Give anything irregular a check before you rely on the result.

Why strip first

What unstripped source actually breaks downstream

Feed raw source into a word counter, a translator or a similarity checker and every tag name and attribute gets counted as though it were content, which throws the result off. In data work it's sharper: a tag sitting unescaped inside a scraped CSV field or a JSON string can break parsing outright, and the error rarely says the real culprit was a leftover div.

Who it's for

Who uses an HTML tag stripper, and when

Developers cleaning scraped pages before they hit a pipeline, an index or a model use this as a standard first pass. Teams working with RSS or Atom feeds, or old CMS exports full of legacy markup, use it to get readable text without keeping any of the tags.

It also shows up in QA work: checking a rendered template's output to catch a stray unescaped tag or entity before it ships to real readers.