Markdown stripper
What the Markdown stripper does
This app takes Markdown and returns the plain text underneath it. A heading loses its #, bold and italic lose their asterisks or underscores, a link keeps its visible text and drops the URL, an image keeps its alt text and drops the rest. What's left is exactly what a reader was meant to see, with the formatting characters gone.
It's local. Stripping runs entirely in your browser, nothing you paste is uploaded, and there's no cap on how much you clean or how often.
For a README, a changelog or draft notes you haven't published anywhere, that local-only guarantee is worth having: there's no reason converting Markdown to plain text should require sending a document out of your hands first.
Workflow
How to strip Markdown syntax in three steps
Nothing to configure.
- Step 1
- Paste your Markdown into the box.
- Step 2
- Press Strip Markdown. It runs instantly, on your device.
- Step 3
- Copy the plain text out.
What comes out
Exactly what Markdown syntax gets removed
This app handles the common Markdown constructs individually: headings marked with one to six #, bold wrapped in ** or __, italic and inline code wrapped in a single *, _ or backtick, images written as , links written as [text](url), blockquotes marked with >, and bulleted list items marked with -, + or *.
In every case, the syntax characters disappear and the readable content inside survives: a bolded word stays a plain word, a link keeps its visible text, an image keeps its alt-text description as a plain sentence.
Worth knowing before you rely on it
What this stripper doesn't touch
Numbered list markers, 1. 2. 3., are left alone, since they're plain digits and punctuation rather than a dedicated Markdown symbol this app targets. Tables, built from pipes and dashes, aren't unwrapped, so a Markdown table comes through with its pipe characters still visible. Fenced code blocks, wrapped in triple backticks, also aren't unwrapped; only single-backtick inline code gets caught by the same pattern that strips italics.
If your source leans on any of these and you need them cleaned too, review the result and finish the job by hand, or run it through the whitespace minifier afterward for a lighter secondary tidy-up.
Two different jobs
Stripping syntax is a different job from formatting Markdown
This tool removes syntax entirely, leaving no Markdown behind at all, just plain readable text. That's correct when the destination can't render Markdown: a plain-text email, an SMS, a field that shows raw characters instead of formatting.
If your content is staying in Markdown and only needs tidying, trailing whitespace trimmed, extra blank lines collapsed, that's a separate job with a different risk profile. The Markdown formatter is built for that; it keeps every heading, bold marker and link exactly as written and only touches the whitespace around them.
Why it matters
What leftover Markdown syntax actually breaks
Paste Markdown into a plain-text field, an SMS, or any form that doesn't render it, and a reader sees literal asterisks and square brackets scattered through every sentence instead of the formatting they were supposed to produce. A word or character count run on unstripped Markdown counts every # and * as a real character, inflating the total past what it should be.
Drop Markdown into a subject line or a meta description and you get the same problem in miniature: visible symbol clutter where clean, readable text belongs.
Who it's for
Who uses a Markdown stripper, and when
Writers converting a Markdown draft into plain text for an email, an SMS or a form that can't render formatting. Developers stripping Markdown out of a README or changelog before feeding the text to a summarizer, a word counter or a translation tool expecting plain prose.
It also comes up preparing a meta description or a preview snippet from Markdown-formatted content, where formatting characters would otherwise show up as literal clutter in a search result or a social card.