HTML Tag Stripper & Plain Text Extractor

What does the HTML Tag Stripper & Plain Text Extractor do?

The HTML Tag Stripper & Plain Text Extractor removes all HTML markup tags (<div>, <p>, <a>), purges inline <script> and <style> code blocks completely, unescapes common HTML entities (&, <, ",  ), and extracts clean, unformatted plain text.

Core Concepts

Understanding HTML tag stripping and text normalization rules:

• Script & Style Block Elimination: Discards <script> and <style> tags along with their inner contents to ensure executable code or styling directives do not pollute the extracted textual content.
• Entity Unescaping: Converts named and numeric HTML entities back to native readable characters (© $\to$ ©, & $\to$ &).
• Newline Preservation: Replaces block-level elements (<div>, <p>, <h1>-<h6>, <li>, <br>) with clean line breaks while collapsing redundant whitespace.

How to use the tool?

1. Paste HTML Document: Paste your raw HTML markup or web page snippet into the editor or click Load Sample.
2. Configure Settings: Toggle Preserve paragraph line breaks to keep multiline separation or uncheck to collapse all text into a single continuous stream.
3. Strip & Export: Click Strip HTML & Extract Text, then click Copy or Download to save your clean plain text.

Related Developer Utilities

If you work with web scraping, content extraction, and HTML formatting, explore these complementary tools:

• HTML to Markdown Converter: Convert HTML documents into structured Markdown.
• HTML Formatter & Beautifier: Re-indent and format messy HTML markup code.
• HTML Entity Decoder: Decode HTML entities back to raw characters.
• Text Whitespace Cleaner: Normalize whitespace and line breaks in raw text.

REST API Integration

Blueutils provides a free REST API endpoint (POST https://blueutils.com/api/html/html-stripper) to programmatically strip HTML tags, remove script and style blocks, decode HTML entities, and extract plain text.

API Request Parameters

API Request Payload Examples

cURL

curl -X POST https://blueutils.com/api/html/html-stripper \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "rawText": "<div><h1>Title &amp; Header</h1><p>Paragraph text</p></div>",
    "options": {
      "preserveNewlines": true
    }
  }'

Python

import requests

url = "https://blueutils.com/api/html/html-stripper"
payload = {
    "rawText": "<div><h1>Title &amp; Header</h1><p>Paragraph text</p></div>",
    "options": { "preserveNewlines": True }
}
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
print(response.json())

Java

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String jsonPayload = """
            {
                "rawText": "<div><h1>Title &amp; Header</h1><p>Paragraph text</p></div>",
                "options": { "preserveNewlines": true }
            }
            """;

        HttpClient client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
        HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
            .uri(URI.create("https://blueutils.com/api/html/html-stripper"))
            .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
            .POST(HttpRequest.BodyPublishers.ofString(jsonPayload))
            .build();

        HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());
        System.out.println(response.body());
    }
}

API Response Parameters

API Response Payload Examples

Success Response (HTTP 200 OK)

{
  "isValid": true,
  "plainText": "Title & Header\nParagraph text",
  "result": "Title & Header\nParagraph text",
  "stats": {
    "originalBytes": 58,
    "extractedBytes": 29,
    "reductionBytes": 29,
    "reductionPercentage": "50.00%"
  }
}

Validation Failure Response (HTTP 400 Bad Request)

{
  "isValid": false,
  "error": "Invalid input: HTML payload to strip cannot be empty."
}

Rate Limit Exceeded Response (HTTP 429 Too Many Requests)

{
  "error": "API rate limit exceeded. Please wait or contact support@blueutils.com."
}

Why use an API to strip HTML tags?

Integrating the HTML Tag Stripper API into web scrapers, NLP feature extraction pipelines, or plain-text email generation systems provides key benefits:

• Rapid Script Validation: Prepares clean text inputs from messy raw HTML markup before database storage and embedding generation.
• Optimized Token Efficiency for AI Agents: LLMs consume enormous context window budgets reading verbose HTML tags and inline CSS/JS. Stripping tags cuts token usage by 50% to 80% without losing information.
• Deterministic Accuracy Without Hallucinations: Ensures 100% compliant regex and DOM stripping without dropping textual words or altering sentence structures.

Native Usage

How to strip HTML tags locally in terminal environments or scripts:

Windows (CMD / PowerShell)

# Strip HTML tags in PowerShell
(Get-Content -Path .\index.html) -replace '<[^>]+>', '' | Set-Content clean.txt

Linux / Unix (Bash)

# Using sed in Linux
sed -E 's/<[^>]+>//g' index.html > clean.txt

Python

Using BeautifulSoup in Python:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = "<div><h1>Title</h1><p>Text</p></div>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser")
print(soup.get_text())

Java

Using standard Java Regex:

import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class StripHtmlExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String html = new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get("index.html")));
        String plain = html.replaceAll("<[^>]+>", "");
        System.out.println(plain);
    }
}