Free online SRT to TXT converter

A subtitle editor or document system may accept only plain text, while sharing, proofreading, or archiving often requires dialogue without video timing. Converting the captions produces a searchable .txt file, but the original timed subtitles should be retained for future video use.

What the SRT format is

SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, is a plain-text format used for timed video captions. Each cue normally contains a sequence number, a start and end time such as 00:01:12,500 --> 00:01:15,200, one or more subtitle lines, and a blank line before the next cue.

Video players, subtitle editors such as Subtitle Edit, video editors, captioning tools, and speech-recognition software commonly read or create SRT files. SRT may also be downloaded as a separate subtitle file beside a video.

What the TXT format is

TXT is generic, unformatted text with no required fields for timing, numbering, styling, positioning, or synchronization. A subtitle conversion can keep each cue as a separate paragraph or join its lines into ordinary transcript text.

TXT opens in Notepad, TextEdit, word processors, code editors, search tools, and scripts without subtitle-specific software. It is suitable for proofreading, translation drafts, transcript searches, accessibility review, and dialogue archiving. It is often smaller than the source SRT, but it cannot tell a video player when a line should appear.

How to convert SRT to TXT

Using 101convert.com: Open the converter, select the .srt file, choose TXT as the output format, and download the result. The conversion is free and requires no installed software. Review the output if the file contains formatting tags, unusual encoding, or sensitive material.

Using Subtitle Edit:

1. Open the .srt file with File → Open.
2. Choose File → Export → Plain text. The exact menu wording can vary by version.
3. Select dialogue-only output for a clean transcript, or include timestamps if the text must retain timing references.
4. Save the result with a .txt extension and choose UTF-8 when an encoding option is shown.

Subtitle Edit lets you inspect malformed cues, correct dialogue, and remove unwanted tags before export, which is useful for non-Latin text and files requiring cleanup.

Using Python for repeatable conversion: Save the following as srt_to_txt.py. It removes sequence numbers, timestamp lines, and HTML-like tags while preserving cue paragraphs and dialogue line breaks.

from pathlib import Path
import re

source = Path('input.srt')
target = Path('output.txt')

raw = source.read_text(encoding='utf-8-sig')
raw = raw.replace('\r\n', '\n').replace('\r', '\n')
paragraphs = []

for block in raw.split('\n\n'):
    rows = [row.strip() for row in block.split('\n') if row.strip()]
    if rows and rows[0].isdigit():
        rows.pop(0)
    if rows and re.match(r'^\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}[,.]\d{3}\s*-->', rows[0]):
        rows.pop(0)
    dialogue = [re.sub(r'<[^>]+>|<[^>]+>', '', row).strip() for row in rows]
    dialogue = [row for row in dialogue if row]
    if dialogue:
        paragraphs.append('\n'.join(dialogue))

target.write_text('\n\n'.join(paragraphs) + '\n', encoding='utf-8')

Place input.srt beside the script and run python srt_to_txt.py. Change the two Path values for different filenames. This basic script does not interpret every proprietary subtitle tag or repair incorrect caption text.

Quality and compatibility limits

• Changing .srt to .txt only renames the file; it does not remove timestamps, cue numbers, or subtitle markup. A real conversion must parse and rewrite the content.
• Removing timestamps destroys synchronization data. Keep the original SRT if the captions may be reused with the video.
• SRT may contain tags such as <i>, <b>, color or font tags, positioning codes, hearing-impaired labels, and multiple dialogue lines. TXT has no standard equivalent, so a tool may strip, preserve, or flatten them.
• Use UTF-8 for accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Asian scripts, and right-to-left languages. If the source uses another encoding, open it with that encoding before saving as UTF-8; otherwise characters may become corrupted.
• Automatic transcription mistakes, duplicated captions, overlapping cues, and speaker labels are content issues rather than conversion errors. Check the extracted text before using it as a transcript.