Tags off, words on
HTML to Text walks markup and keeps character data. script and style contents should be dropped. Tags disappear. Entities like & and should become & and a space. Line breaks are inferred from block tags (p, div, br, li, h1) so the result is readable rather than one long line. ToolPin does this in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. The tool is free and needs no account.
This is the inverse of Markdown to HTML only in a loose sense: you will not get Markdown back, just text. Links may appear as the link text only, or as text plus URL — check the output. Images become nothing or their alt attribute.
What a stripper cannot see
It does not execute JavaScript, so content injected by JS is absent unless it was already in the pasted HTML. It does not fetch a URL from the internet; you paste the source. It does not apply CSS; display:none text might still appear if it is in the HTML. Tables flatten. That is enough for emails and article bodies, not for a pixel-perfect reading of a web app.
Malformed HTML can confuse a simple parser. If the result looks empty, the text may have lived only in attributes or in a broken fragment. Paste a smaller piece.
Security
Do not paste HTML and then feed the result into a shell or into innerHTML without thought. Stripping tags is not a complete sanitizer for every XSS vector, but it is far safer than rendering unknown HTML. Still, treat the output as untrusted if the source was.
Because processing is local, confidential HTML emails stay on your machine.
After you extract
Count words, convert case, or hash the text with SHA-256 if you are fingerprinting a version. If you needed structured data, this is the wrong tool — parse the HTML in a script. If you needed a PDF of the rendered page, print from a browser; ToolPin HTML to Text will not paginate a design.
Related: DOCX to Text for Word files (also local), PDF to Text for PDFs (local PDF tools). Those start from documents, not markup.
Entities, whitespace, and emails
Named entities (nbsp, copy, mdash) and numeric entities should decode to the real characters. If you still see & in the output, the source was double-escaped — decode once more or fix the exporter. Collapse of extra blank lines is normal; a newsletter’s table-based layout becomes a long column of phrases, which is what you want for SMS and not what you want for design QA.
HTML email is notoriously messy: VML for Outlook, hidden preheader spans, and tracker pixels. Those pixels will not load here because we only strip text, but their alt or leftover URLs might appear. Delete tracking URLs before you forward the plain-text version.
ToolPin does not fetch remote HTML. Paste what you already have, convert, and copy the words into the next tool — Word Counter, Case Converter, or a translator — all without an account.