Free online HTML to TXT converter

Some programs, command-line tools, archives, and email systems accept only plain text, so saved web pages must be stripped of HTML markup before use. Converting the file also produces a smaller, searchable version for editing, logging, or long-term text archiving.

What the HTML format is

HTML is a markup language that defines a document's structure, including headings, paragraphs, links, lists, tables, images, forms, scripts, and formatting. Browsers render HTML files, while editors and publishing systems such as Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, WordPress, and web-authoring tools create or modify them. Saved web pages, exported reports, email messages, and website source documents commonly use .html or .htm files.

What the TXT format is

TXT stores character data without HTML tags, CSS styling, fonts, colors, images, scripts, or page layout. It opens in basic editors such as Notepad and TextEdit, terminal editors, document-management systems, and most operating systems. Plain text is usually small, searchable, easy to version-control, and accepted by software that rejects formatted documents.

A TXT file still has an encoding and line-ending convention. UTF-8 is the safest general choice because it supports accented characters, non-Latin scripts, and symbols; Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, and other legacy encodings support fewer characters.

How to convert HTML to TXT

Using 101convert.com

1. Open the HTML-to-TXT converter on 101convert.com; it can be used free without installing software.
2. Select or upload the source .html or .htm file.
3. Start the conversion and save the resulting .txt file.
4. Open the output in a text editor and check headings, lists, tables, links, and non-English characters.

Using Pandoc locally

Pandoc is suitable for repeatable command-line conversion. Run:

pandoc input.html -t plain -o output.txt

Pandoc writes text output in UTF-8 by default. For a local HTML file that refers to relative images, stylesheets, or other resources, keep the referenced folders available during conversion; those resources can affect parsing, but images and visual styling cannot be represented in TXT.

Using a browser for selected content

Open the file in a browser, select the content to keep, copy it, and paste it into a plain-text editor with Edit → Paste and Match Style, Paste as plain text, or the editor's equivalent. Save the result as output.txt and select UTF-8 if an encoding option is shown. This method converts only the selected rendered content, so it can omit navigation, hidden sections, or content inserted by scripts; it can also change table columns and list indentation.

Using LibreOffice

Open the HTML file in LibreOffice and choose File → Save As. Select Text (.txt), save the file, then choose the character encoding and line-ending settings in the export dialog. This is useful for manual conversion, but the resulting spacing and table layout still depend on how LibreOffice interprets the HTML.

Quality and compatibility limitations

Changing .html to .txt by renaming the extension does not convert the content: it leaves HTML tags, scripts, and attributes in the file. A text editor can display the source, but a plain-text consumer will not automatically turn that source into readable page text.

TXT cannot preserve CSS, page layout, images, audio, video, forms, scripts, clickable link behavior, or exact table structure. A converter may retain a link's visible label, emit its URL, or discard the destination. Navigation, advertisements, hidden elements, and script-generated content may be omitted or included differently depending on whether the conversion reads the original source or the browser-rendered page.

Inspect long lines, blank-line spacing, list markers, and table data after conversion because plain text has no universal layout standard. If characters appear corrupted, reopen the file using the source encoding or convert it explicitly to UTF-8; changing the filename extension cannot repair an encoding mismatch.