Convert HTML to Plain Text
Free online converter for HTML files. Unformatted UTF-8 text. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
Drag and drop your files
or
Upload a HTML file to convert it to Plain Text. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About HTML and TXT
HTML .html
The markup language of the web: text wrapped in tags that describe structure, which a browser then renders.
Good for
- Opens in any browser on any device
- Structural and accessible when written properly
- Styleable, linkable and searchable
Trade-offs
- Appearance depends on the renderer and its stylesheet
- Images and styles usually live outside the file
- No fixed pagination — awkward to print predictably
text/html
Plain Text .txt
Just characters. No fonts, no sizes, no layout — which is exactly why it will still open, unchanged, in fifty years.
Good for
- Universally readable, now and indefinitely
- Tiny, and works with every text tool ever written
- Nothing hidden — what you see is the whole file
Trade-offs
- No formatting, images or structure whatsoever
- Character encoding must be right or accents break
- Line endings differ between Windows and everything else
text/plain
HTML and TXT side by side
| HTML | TXT | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Plain text markup | None |
| Animation | Yes — via CSS | No |
| Typically used for | Web pages, email templates, exported reports | Notes, logs, source data, long-term archives |
What changes when you convert HTML to TXT
Read as UTF-8
A HTML is a text file, and a text file does not record which encoding it uses — that is the one thing the format cannot tell you about itself. We read it as UTF-8, which is right for essentially anything produced this decade. A file saved long ago in a regional encoding can arrive with accented characters mangled, and the fix is to re-save it as UTF-8 before converting rather than after. Tabs and spaces used to line columns up will also shift once the text is set in a proportional typeface.
Only the words survive
TXT stores characters and nothing else, so fonts, sizes, colours, images, tables and page layout are all dropped. What you get back is the text itself — which is the point when you want the content free of the formatting around it.
Structure flattens to a stream of words
Tags are removed and the text inside them is kept, so headings, list items and paragraphs all arrive as ordinary lines. Anything carried by an attribute rather than by the text — link destinations, image sources, alt text — is gone, and content generated by scripts was never in the file to begin with.
Other HTML conversions
Other ways to get Plain Text
Worth reading next
Word to PDF: what survives, what moves and what disappears
The conversion that looks simplest is the one that quietly shifts a line break and pushes your last paragraph onto a page of its own. Here is what actually happens, and what to look at afterwards.
5 min read
Why you cannot copy text out of a scanned PDF
Two PDFs can look identical and be completely different files. One contains text; the other contains a photograph of text. Only one of them can be searched, copied or converted to Word.
5 min read