HTML is the language of the web—but sometimes you just need the words. Extracting plain text from HTML strips away all the tags, styles, scripts, and structure, leaving pure content. Whether you're preparing text for analysis, migrating content between systems, creating accessible versions, or simply need clean text to paste elsewhere, converting HTML to TXT gives you exactly what you need: words without markup.
TL;DR
- Upload HTML to TinyUtils Document Converter
- Select Plain Text as output
- Download text without any HTML markup
- Perfect for content extraction and text analysis
Understanding HTML and Plain Text
What is HTML?
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the foundation of every webpage. It uses tags to define structure and content: <p> for paragraphs, <h1> for headings, <a> for links, <div> for containers. Beyond content, HTML files typically include CSS styles for appearance, JavaScript for interactivity, navigation menus, sidebars, footers, and other elements that aren't the primary content.
When you view a webpage, your browser interprets all this markup and presents formatted content. But the underlying HTML file contains far more than just the visible text—it's a structured document with layers of markup, styling, and scripting.
What is Plain Text?
Plain text (TXT) is the simplest possible digital document: just characters and nothing else. No formatting codes, no tags, no hidden metadata, no structure beyond the text itself. Plain text files open identically on every computer, operating system, and text editor in existence. They're the universal lowest common denominator for text content.
Plain text's simplicity makes it ideal for specific purposes: text analysis where markup would interfere, content migration where you need clean source material, accessibility where formatting complexity creates barriers, and archival where long-term readability matters most.
Why Extract Text from HTML?
1. Text Analysis and NLP
Natural language processing tools, sentiment analyzers, topic modelers, and machine learning text classifiers expect plain text input. HTML tags, navigation elements, and JavaScript would confuse these tools and corrupt results. Extracting pure text provides the clean input that text analysis requires.
2. Content Extraction
Need the actual content from a webpage without the surrounding structure? Whether you're archiving articles, collecting research material, or extracting text for quotation, plain text gives you just the words.
3. Content Migration
Moving content from HTML-based systems to plain text databases, flat files, or non-HTML platforms requires stripping the markup. Converting to TXT provides clean content ready for import.
4. SEO and Content Analysis
When analyzing what search engines actually see on a page, extracting plain text removes visual distractions. You can focus on word counts, keyword density, and content structure without markup interference.
5. Accessibility
Some users need content in the simplest possible format. Plain text eliminates all formatting complexity, providing content that works with any assistive technology and adapts to any display preferences.
6. Email and Messaging
When pasting web content into emails or messaging apps, HTML markup often creates formatting problems. Plain text pastes cleanly into any context without unwanted styling.
7. Data Processing
Scripts, APIs, and automated workflows often process text more easily than HTML. Converting first enables programmatic text manipulation with standard string processing tools.
What Gets Removed in Conversion
Converting HTML to plain text strips everything except the actual text content:
- All HTML tags — Every <p>, <div>, <span>, <h1>, and other element is removed
- CSS styles — Both inline styles and style blocks are stripped
- JavaScript — All script code is removed completely
- Comments — HTML comments don't appear in output
- Images — Only alt text may remain; images themselves are removed
- Navigation — Menu structures, breadcrumbs, and nav elements are stripped
- Sidebars and footers — All page structure elements are removed
- Forms — Form elements, buttons, and inputs are stripped
- Links — The link text remains; URLs are removed
- Meta information — Title, description, keywords are not included
What's Preserved
The conversion keeps what matters for text extraction:
- All visible text content — Every word that would appear on the rendered page
- Paragraph breaks — Separation between paragraphs is maintained
- List items — List content appears as separate lines
- Table content — Cell text is preserved, though table structure is lost
- Heading text — Heading content appears, though formatting is gone
How to Convert HTML to Plain Text
Using TinyUtils Document Converter
- Navigate to TinyUtils Document Converter
- Click the upload area or drag and drop your HTML file
- Select Plain Text (.txt) from the output format dropdown
- Click Convert to process the document
- Download your .txt file
- Use the clean text in your analysis, migration, or workflow
The converter intelligently strips HTML while preserving readable text structure, producing output that's ready for any text-based use case.
Batch Conversion
Extracting text from multiple HTML files? Upload several files at once. The converter processes each file and delivers a ZIP archive containing all your text files, preserving original filenames with .txt extensions.
Handling Different HTML Sources
Full Webpages
Complete webpages include navigation, headers, footers, and other structural elements beyond the main content. The converter extracts all visible text, which may include more than just the article body. For cleanest results, consider extracting just the content section before conversion.
HTML Fragments
Partial HTML—like content from a CMS export or a specific page section—converts cleanly to just the contained text. Without navigation and chrome, you get pure content.
Email HTML
HTML emails often contain complex table layouts for formatting. The converter extracts text from these structures, though visual formatting (columns, positioning) is lost in plain text.
Documentation HTML
Technical documentation exported as HTML—from tools like Sphinx, Jekyll, or Hugo—converts to clean text suitable for indexing, searching, or processing.
Common Use Cases
Web Scraping Cleanup
Scraped HTML needs processing before analysis. Extracting plain text removes markup overhead, leaving clean content for data processing pipelines.
Search Index Population
Search engines and internal search systems index plain text more efficiently than HTML. Converting pages to TXT provides clean content for indexing without markup interference.
Content Archival
For long-term preservation of webpage content, plain text provides durability. The text remains readable regardless of HTML rendering capabilities or CSS/JavaScript dependencies.
Research and Citation
Extracting text from web sources for research papers, citations, or content analysis starts with clean plain text. No need to manually copy-paste around navigation and ads.
Machine Learning Training Data
Training text classifiers, language models, or NLP systems requires clean text corpora. Converting HTML content to TXT prepares training data without markup contamination.
Accessibility Remediation
For users who need the simplest possible format, plain text removes all potential complexity. Screen readers handle TXT perfectly without parsing HTML structure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will links be preserved?
Link text (the clickable words) is kept. URLs are removed since plain text has no concept of hyperlinks. If you need URLs preserved, consider converting to Markdown instead, which preserves links in a text format.
What about alt text for images?
Alt text may be included in the output, depending on the HTML structure. Images themselves (the visual content) cannot exist in plain text and are removed.
Can I keep some structure?
For output that preserves structural elements like headings and lists, convert to Markdown instead of plain text. Markdown maintains hierarchy in a text-friendly format.
What about tables?
Table cell content is extracted as text. The visual table structure (rows, columns, borders) is lost. For structured tabular data, consider converting to CSV instead.
Will scripts affect the output?
JavaScript code is completely removed. Only the static HTML content is converted—dynamically generated content from scripts won't appear in the output.
What's the maximum file size?
The converter handles HTML files up to 50MB. Most webpages are far smaller. Very large HTML files with extensive content process in seconds.
Character Encoding
The converter produces UTF-8 encoded plain text, which supports:
- All Latin characters — English, French, German, Spanish, and more
- Extended Latin — Accented characters, special symbols
- Cyrillic scripts — Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian
- Greek — Modern and ancient Greek
- Asian scripts — Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK)
- Special symbols — Mathematical symbols, currency, arrows
UTF-8 is the modern standard for text encoding, ensuring your extracted content displays correctly everywhere.
Why Use an Online Converter?
While you could strip HTML tags manually or with regex, a proper converter offers advantages:
- Complete extraction — Handles all HTML elements, entities, and edge cases
- Entity decoding — Converts & to &, to space, etc.
- Script removal — Properly strips JavaScript without leaving artifacts
- Batch processing — Convert multiple files at once, download as ZIP
- No installation — Convert from any device with a browser
- Consistent output — Same clean results regardless of HTML complexity
Ready to Extract Pure Text?
Converting HTML to plain text gives you clean content extracted from web pages, ready for analysis, migration, or any text-based workflow. Open TinyUtils Document Converter, upload your HTML file, and download pure text in seconds.
Need other format conversions? Check out our guides for HTML to Markdown, Markdown to HTML, and HTML to DOCX workflows.