Markdown to Text Converter

Plain words, no symbols

Markdown is readable as source, but it is still full of marks meant for a renderer: hashes before headings, asterisks around bold text, brackets and parentheses around links, pipes in tables, backtick fences around code. The Markdown to Text Converter removes all of that and hands back the words alone. The result is plain text you can paste into a form field, a text message, a plain-text email, a subtitle file, a spreadsheet cell or an AI prompt without stray symbols getting in the way.

How the conversion works

This tool does not just delete symbols with search and replace. It renders the Markdown properly first, then removes the markup. When you press Convert, your text is sent to the site's server, where it is:

1. converted to HTML with the league/commonmark library using GitHub Flavored Markdown, which understands tables, strikethrough and autolinks;
2. cleaned with HTML Purifier;
3. stripped of every HTML tag;
4. decoded, so entities such as & become a real ampersand;
5. tidied, with runs of spaces and tabs collapsed to a single space and runs of three or more line breaks reduced to one blank line;
6. trimmed at the start and end.

Because the Markdown is parsed rather than pattern-matched, escaped characters and edge cases such as underscores inside words are handled the way a real Markdown renderer handles them. The server returns the text to your page and the code does not save it. Each request accepts up to 200,000 characters.

What happens to each kind of element

A short example. This input:

# Release 2.0
We **shipped** the [new editor](https://example.com) & more.
- Fast
- Small

comes out as:

Release 2.0
We shipped the new editor & more.

Fast
Small

Converting a document

1. Paste Markdown into Input Markdown, or press Paste at the top.
2. Press Convert. The button shows Working while the server processes the text.
3. Read the result in Output Text. Footers show characters and words for both input and output, which makes it easy to see how much of the input was markup.
4. Press the copy icon to copy the text, or the download icon to save it as markdown-plain-text.txt.
5. Press the clear icon beside the input to empty both panels when you are done.

When plain text is the right format

• Word and character counts. Counting words in Markdown source inflates the total with URLs and symbols. Convert first and the output word count reflects what a reader actually sees.
• Plain-text email and SMS. Recipients see clean sentences instead of asterisks and brackets.
• Prompts and datasets. Language models, translation tools and search indexes often do better with prose than with markup.
• Accessibility checks and read-aloud. Text-to-speech will not read out link addresses or formatting symbols.
• App store descriptions, form fields and metadata that accept text only.

Tips for better output

• Write link labels that make sense alone. Since URLs are removed, "click here" becomes meaningless. "Read the installation guide" survives the conversion well.
• Keep important addresses in the text. If a URL must remain visible, write it as part of the sentence or use the Keep URLs mode of Markdown Strip Links before converting.
• Describe important images in prose. Alt text is dropped, so a chart that matters needs a sentence.
• Put list numbers in the text if order matters. Automatic numbering is lost, so steps that refer to "step 3" may need rewording.

What not to use it for

• Source code. Indentation and alignment inside code blocks are collapsed to single spaces, which breaks languages like Python and YAML. Copy code from the original instead.
• Tabular data you still need as a table. Cells are flattened onto separate lines. Keep the table, or format it with the Markdown Table Formatter.
• Documents where the links are the point. A list of resources loses every address.

Choosing between plain text and partial cleanup

Converting to plain text is the most thorough option, and sometimes it is more than you need. If you only want links gone but headings and lists kept as Markdown, Markdown Strip Links changes the links and nothing else. If tables are the only thing in the way, Markdown Remove Tables cuts them out and keeps the rest of the formatting. Use this converter when the destination cannot show any formatting at all and every symbol would be noise.

Checking the result before you use it

Plain text hides problems that formatting used to reveal, so give the output a quick read before pasting it somewhere public:

• Compare the word counts. The output count is normally a little lower than the input count because URLs and symbols are gone. A much lower figure suggests a whole block disappeared, often a raw HTML block or an image-only section.
• Look at headings. Each heading sits directly above its first paragraph. If the destination needs visual separation, add a blank line after headings by hand.
• Scan list sections. Without bullets, nested items line up with their parents, so a long list can read like a single run of short sentences.
• Search for orphaned references such as "see below" or "in the table" that no longer point to anything.

Limitations

• Up to 200,000 characters per conversion; the conversion needs a connection to the server.
• Link URLs and image alt text are not kept.
• List markers and numbering are not kept.
• Whitespace runs are collapsed everywhere, including inside code.
• Headings are not separated from the following paragraph by a blank line.
• Footnotes, math and other extensions beyond GitHub Flavored Markdown are not interpreted.

Frequently Asked Questions