Free online XML to ASCII converter

A legacy importer may reject XML markup or characters outside 7-bit ASCII, requiring either extracted plain text or an ASCII-encoded XML document. Choose the output that the receiving program expects: these are different conversions.

What XML is

XML (Extensible Markup Language) stores structured data in elements and attributes, alongside text. Applications, databases, office tools, and data-export systems use it for configuration, documents, and exchanged records. XML is text, but it may include markup and Unicode characters.

What ASCII is

ASCII is a 7-bit character encoding with 128 characters, including basic English letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters. ASCII-encoded text can suit older software and interfaces that reject other bytes. Plain text is not necessarily ASCII: text encoded as UTF-8, for example, can contain characters ASCII cannot represent.

For a plain-text output, extracting XML text removes elements and attributes. To retain the document structure, serialize the XML using ASCII and represent unsupported characters as XML character references. Check which form the destination accepts.

Online on 101convert.com

1. Check that the converter lists your XML type as an input and ASCII as an output.
2. Upload a file, or add several files for batch conversion, then start the conversion.
3. Download the result. Check the per-file size limit shown on the page.

The conversion runs on the site’s server with alphaTab and PyGuitarPro. Do not assume arbitrary XML types are supported; check the listed formats first.

Offline with desktop software

Python 3 runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and can extract text or re-encode XML locally. To extract text nodes and discard markup, save this as xml_to_ascii.py:

import sys
import unicodedata
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

root = ET.parse(sys.argv[1]).getroot()
text = "".join(root.itertext())
ascii_text = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text).encode("ascii", "ignore").decode("ascii")
with open(sys.argv[2], "w", encoding="ascii") as output:
    output.write(ascii_text)

Run python xml_to_ascii.py input.xml output.txt (use python3 where that is the Python command). The script concatenates text nodes without adding separators; adjust it if the receiving system needs line breaks or field labels. Characters that cannot be decomposed into ASCII are dropped, which can lose information.

To keep the XML elements and attributes while writing ASCII-encoded XML, use this alternative script:

import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse(sys.argv[1])
tree.write(sys.argv[2], encoding="us-ascii", xml_declaration=True)

Save it as a separate .py file and run it with the same command pattern. Python writes non-ASCII characters as XML character references. Serialization can change formatting and does not necessarily preserve comments or the document type declaration.

Quality and compatibility

Compare the result with the destination’s expected structure and encoding. Extracted text is not a replacement for XML when the application needs tags or attributes. ASCII cannot directly represent many names and symbols: the extraction script drops some characters, while character references preserve them only if the recipient accepts XML.