What is HTML text extraction?

HTML text extraction is the process of removing all markup tags, attributes, and code from an HTML document to retrieve only the human-readable text content. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) structures web pages using tags like <p>, <div>, <span>, and hundreds of others that define how content is displayed. While browsers render these tags invisibly, the underlying source code contains far more than just text.

When you copy text from a webpage, you typically get clean text. But when working with raw HTML source code, extracting meaningful text requires parsing through nested tags, handling special elements like scripts and styles, and properly managing whitespace. This is especially important for tasks like content analysis, data migration, accessibility auditing, or preparing text for further processing.

Tool description

This tool strips all HTML tags and extracts pure text content from any HTML input. It intelligently handles block-level elements, inline content, and special elements like scripts and style blocks. The extracted text is presented with optional formatting controls and comprehensive statistics about the content.

Examples

Input:

<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      body {
        color: black;
      }
    </style>
    <script>
      console.log("Hello");
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to Our Site</h1>
    <p>
      This is a <strong>sample</strong> paragraph with <em>formatted</em> text.
    </p>
    <ul>
      <li>First item</li>
      <li>Second item</li>
    </ul>
    <!-- This is a comment -->
  </body>
</html>

Output:

Welcome to Our Site

This is a sample paragraph with formatted text.

First item

Second item

Features

  • Removes all HTML tags while preserving text content
  • Excludes script, style, and comment content by default
  • Preserves document structure with intelligent line break handling
  • Real-time character, word, line, and paragraph statistics
  • Syntax-highlighted HTML input editor

Options explained

Option Description
Preserve line breaks Converts block-level HTML elements (paragraphs, divs, headings, list items) into line breaks, maintaining the visual structure of the document
Remove extra whitespace Collapses multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces and normalizes line breaks, producing cleaner output
Exclude scripts Removes all <script> tags and their JavaScript content from the extraction
Exclude styles Removes all <style> tags and their CSS content from the extraction
Exclude comments Removes HTML comments (<!-- ... -->) from the extraction

Use cases

  • Content migration: Extract text from legacy HTML pages when moving content to a new CMS or platform without carrying over outdated markup
  • SEO analysis: Analyze the actual text content of a webpage to check keyword density, readability scores, or content length without tag interference
  • Data processing: Prepare HTML content for natural language processing, text analysis, or machine learning pipelines that require plain text input