Introducing Highlights: the context that matters
Free Tools

Website to Text and HTML to Text Converter

Extract clean text from any website or convert pasted HTML to plain text for free. Keep paragraphs and lists, drop scripts and menus, and download a .txt file.

How do I extract text from a website?

  1. Choose From URL to read a live page, or Paste HTML to convert markup you already have.
  2. Enter the page URL or paste the HTML source.
  3. Keep Main content only on to skip navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars. Turn on Keep link URLs to add each link address after its text.
  4. Click Extract text or Convert to text, then copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

How do I convert HTML to plain text?

Paste the HTML into the Paste HTML tab and click Convert to text. The conversion runs in your browser with its built-in HTML parser, and nothing is sent to our servers. Paragraphs, headings, and table rows become line breaks, list items get a dash or a number, table cells are separated by tabs, and code inside pre blocks keeps its spacing.

What is the difference between HTML, plain text, and Markdown?

HTML marks up structure and presentation with tags. Plain text keeps only the words and line breaks, which is what you want for word counts, translation, search indexes, or pasting into a document. Markdown sits in between: it keeps headings, links, lists, and tables in a light syntax, which makes it a better fit for LLM prompts and RAG pipelines. For Markdown output, use the free URL to Markdown converter.

How do I extract text from many websites with an API?

The free tool reads one page at a time. To pull text from many pages in code, use the web scraping API: one request returns a page as Markdown or HTML for 1 credit, with JavaScript rendering and proxies included. Use the website crawler API to read a whole site from one starting URL, or the bulk web scraping API for long URL lists.

What can you do with text extracted from a website?

  • Copy article text without ads, menus, and cookie banners
  • Count words or check the reading level of a page
  • Send page text to a translation or proofreading tool
  • Build search indexes or text datasets from public pages
  • Clean up HTML exported from an email builder or CMS

Frequently asked questions

Is the website to text tool free?
Yes. Pasted HTML is converted in your browser with no daily limit. Extracting text from a URL is free for up to 50 pages a day, with no account needed.
Is my pasted HTML uploaded anywhere?
No. HTML you paste is converted to text in your browser and is not sent to Context.dev. Only URL mode makes a request, because the page has to be fetched and rendered first.
What does Main content only do?
It keeps the page’s main element or article when it has one, and otherwise removes the header, navigation, footer, sidebars, and forms. Turn it off to keep every piece of visible text on the page.
Does the text output keep links?
By default the output keeps link text only. Turn on Keep link URLs to add each link’s full address in parentheses after its text. Relative links are resolved against the page URL.
Why is some text missing from the output?
The tool drops scripts, styles, hidden elements, buttons, and form fields, and Main content only also drops page chrome. Text drawn inside images or canvas elements is not text in the HTML, so it cannot be extracted.
Can it extract text from pages built with JavaScript?
Yes. In URL mode the page is rendered in a real browser before the text is read, so content built by React, Vue, or other client-side frameworks is included. Pages behind a login cannot be read.

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