Markdown to Plain Text Converter | Strip the syntax, keep the words
Remove every Markdown construct — headings, bold, italics, links, images, code blocks and tables — and get clean, unformatted plain text. Links keep their visible label, images keep their alt text, so the meaning survives while the symbols disappear.
💡 About this tool
You wrote something in Markdown, but the place you need to paste it doesn't render Markdown. Now your # headings, **bold** markers and [label](url) links sit there as literal clutter. It happens more often than you'd think: plain-text email bodies, comment fields that don't parse Markdown, word-count checks, building a clean text corpus, or pulling a readable excerpt out of a README.
This converter mechanically strips the syntax and leaves the content. It removes heading hashes, bold and italic markers (* and _), blockquote arrows, list bullets, horizontal rules, strikethrough and task-list checkboxes. Links collapse to their visible text and images collapse to their alt text. Fenced code blocks lose their backtick fences but keep the code inside, so a post full of snippets won't lose its examples. Tables are flattened to tab-separated cell values.
🧐 Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What happens to the link URLs?
A link like [Found Tools](https://example.com) keeps only the visible label "Found Tools". The destination URL is dropped from the output.
Q. Do images get deleted entirely?
The image syntax  keeps only the alt text. An image with empty alt leaves nothing behind.
Q. Is the code inside code blocks preserved? Yes. Triple-backtick fenced blocks have their fences removed but the code inside stays intact. Inline backticks are removed too, but the characters they wrapped remain.
Q. How are tables handled?
Each row's cells are joined with tabs. The |---|---| separator rows are removed. The original ruled-grid layout is not reconstructed.
Q. What if there's raw HTML mixed in?
HTML tags such as <br> or <div> are stripped. The text between the tags is kept.
Q. Is my text uploaded anywhere? The conversion runs entirely inside your browser.
📚 Why stripping Markdown is reliable
Markdown was released in 2004 by John Gruber, with input from Aaron Swartz, and one of its stated design goals was that the source should read naturally as plain text even before it's rendered. That goal is exactly why a stripper works so cleanly: the markup was always meant to be lightweight punctuation around words you can already read.
The complication is dialects. GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) adds task lists, tables and strikethrough, while CommonMark exists to pin down the ambiguous corners of the original spec. This tool targets the constructs those popular dialects share — headings, emphasis, links, images, blockquotes, lists, code, tables, strikethrough and task lists — so the same paste-and-strip flow works across most flavors you'll meet in the wild.