Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities | Remove HTML & Unescape Entities

Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities (Free Tool)

Remove HTML tags, decode HTML entities (named & numeric), remove scripts/styles, and convert breaks to newlines — all client-side for privacy.
HTML
Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities
Paste HTML or escaped text to extract readable content. Options: preserve tags, remove scripts/styles, decode entities, convert breaks to newlines.
Chars: 0 • Tags detected: 0 • Lines: 0
Tip: Use "Preview Only" to inspect decoded content before stripping tags or removing scripts.

Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities — Extract Clean Text from HTML

Pasting content from web pages, emails, or CMS editors often brings messy HTML: tags, inline styles, scripts, and encoded entities like   and . Whether you're preparing text for publishing, cleaning data for NLP, or sharing a readable excerpt, you frequently need to extract plain text and decode entities. The Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities tool removes unwanted HTML while giving you control: preserve specific tags, remove scripts/styles, convert break tags to newlines, and decode both named and numeric entities — all locally in your browser for privacy and speed.

Common scenarios where this helps

1. Clean CMS paste: Copying content from Google Docs or Word into a CMS often includes hidden tags and inline styles. Stripping tags and decoding entities yields clean text ready for editing or publishing.

2. Prepare text for NLP: Natural language processing pipelines benefit from plain text without HTML noise. Remove tags and decode entities before tokenization and stopword removal to prevent malformed tokens.

3. Extract readable snippets: When you want to share a quote or paragraph without markup, converting <br> and <p> to newlines preserves readability while removing presentation markup.

4. Data anonymization & redaction prep: Stripping out scripts and tags reduces complexity before redacting or pseudonymizing data fields in exported content.

How the tool works

The tool performs three main steps in order: (1) optionally remove <script> and <style> blocks to avoid keeping executable or stylistic content, (2) decode HTML entities using the browser DOM for robust decoding of named and numeric entities, and (3) remove remaining tags while offering optional masking for tags you want to preserve (for example, keep <strong> or <a> tags). Converting line-break tags to real newlines improves readability when you need plain paragraphs.

Options and best practices

  • Remove scripts/styles: Keep this on unless you intentionally want inline scripts or CSS to remain (rare for plain-text extraction).
  • Preserve tags: If you need to keep formatting like emphasis or links, list tags such as strong,em,a. The tool temporarily masks those tags, strips everything else, then restores the preserved tags.
  • Convert breaks to newlines: Turning HTML break tags into newline characters produces readable plain text for copy/paste or downstream processing.
  • Preview first: Use the Preview Only button to decode entities and check the content before permanently stripping tags.

Limitations & edge cases

The tool relies on heuristics and browser decoding; it handles the vast majority of common HTML fragments and entities. However, extremely malformed HTML or intentionally obfuscated markup may produce imperfect results. Preserving complex nested tags or reconstructing original markup structure (attributes, inline event handlers) is outside this tool’s scope — it focuses on readable text extraction. For full HTML parsing and transformations, use a server-side parser or editor (e.g., BeautifulSoup, Cheerio, htmlparser2) as part of a development workflow.

Examples

Example 1: Pasted email HTML with inline styles — enable "Remove <script>/<style>" and "Convert <br> to newlines" to get a plain readable email body.

Example 2: Blog content with emphasis — add strong,em to Preserve tags so that bold/italic remains while removing other markup.

Privacy & performance

Processing is done locally in your browser: nothing is uploaded to servers. This is ideal for cleaning sensitive content. The tool is fast for regular content sizes (articles, emails, CMS fragments). Very large HTML dumps (megabytes) may be slower depending on device resources; in those cases consider server-side preprocessing.

Wrap-up

Whether you're preparing content for publication, cleaning data for analysis, or extracting readable excerpts, this tool makes it easy to strip HTML and decode entities safely and privately. Paste your HTML, tweak the options, preview, and extract clean text in seconds.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Will this remove inline CSS and JavaScript?

If "Remove <script>/<style>" is enabled, script and style blocks are removed. Inline attributes remain only for preserved tags if you choose to preserve them; otherwise tags and attributes are stripped.

2. Does it decode HTML entities like &#8211; and &eacute;?

Yes — the tool decodes named and numeric entities using the browser's HTML parser, falling back to common-entity replacements if necessary.

3. Can I preserve links (<a> tags)?

Yes — add a to the preserve list. The tag will be restored in the output; note attributes (href) are preserved only as the original markup — the tool focuses on content extraction.

4. Will paragraph tags become line breaks?

If "Convert <br>/<p> to newlines" is enabled, paragraph and break tags are converted to newline characters for readable output.

5. Is the process secure for sensitive text?

Yes — everything runs locally in your browser; we do not send your text to any server.

6. Can I undo after stripping?

Yes — the Undo button restores the previous output state during your session.

7. Will it remove HTML comments?

Yes — comments are treated as tags and removed during stripping unless preserved via masking (which is uncommon).

8. How accurate is entity decoding?

Accuracy is high for common named and numeric entities since decoding uses the browser DOM. Very rare or nonstandard entities may be left as-is.

9. Does it preserve line breaks in preformatted text?

The tool decodes and preserves whitespace; preformatted blocks (<pre>) will be stripped by default — if you need to preserve them, avoid removing that tag by listing it in the preserve list.

10. Can I keep formatting like bold and italics?

Yes — list tags like strong,em in the preserve field to keep them.

11. Will it handle malformed HTML?

The tool does its best with malformed HTML, but results may vary. For robust parsing of broken HTML, use a dedicated parser on the server side.

12. Can it remove tracking pixels or hidden elements?

Yes — hidden elements are tags and will be removed unless preserved. Tracking pixels embedded as <img> tags will be stripped unless you preserve img tags.

13. Is this tool free?

Yes — Strip HTML Tags & Decode Entities is free and requires no registration.

14. Does it support large HTML files?

It handles typical fragments and article-size HTML. Extremely large files (multi-MB) may be slower and are better processed with server-side tools.

15. Can I download the cleaned text?

Yes — use the Download (.txt) button to save the cleaned output to your device.