Markdown to Plain Text

Sometimes you just want the words. This tool strips every Markdown marker — the hashes, asterisks, backticks, brackets, and angle brackets — and gives back clean, readable plain text. Useful for pasting into a plain-text email, feeding text to a tool that chokes on markup, or counting the actual prose without the syntax getting in the way.

How to use the Markdown to Plain Text

Paste your Markdown on the left; the plain-text version appears on the right and updates as you type. By default, links are reduced to just their visible text — [docs](https://example.com) becomes docs. If you would rather keep the destinations, tick Keep link URLs in parentheses and the same link becomes docs (https://example.com).

The converter removes heading hashes, bold and italic markers, strikethrough, inline-code backticks, blockquote markers, and list bullets, while keeping the underlying text and line structure intact. Fenced code blocks have their fences removed but their contents preserved, so a snippet stays readable. Images are reduced to their alt text, reference-style link definitions are dropped, and stray HTML tags are stripped.

Click Copy plain text to grab the result. As with every tool here, the conversion runs entirely in your browser.

When plain text beats Markdown

Markdown is wonderful for writing, but plenty of destinations do not render it — and showing raw markup there looks worse than no formatting at all. A plain-text email client displays literal asterisks around your "bold" words. A CSV cell, a database TEXT column, an SMS, or a legacy ticketing system will store the markup verbatim. Accessibility tools and text-to-speech engines read the symbols aloud. In all of these cases, stripping the syntax produces a cleaner result than leaving it in.

Plain text is also the right input for many analysis tasks. Word counts, readability scores, and keyword extraction are all distorted by markup: backticks, brackets, and URL strings inflate counts and confuse tokenizers. Stripping to prose first gives you numbers that reflect what a reader actually sees. The same applies when you want a quick, faithful preview of the words in a document without opening a renderer.

Note that converting to plain text is deliberately lossy and one-way. Structure that Markdown encoded — which words were emphasized, where a link pointed — is flattened away. That is the point: you are trading fidelity for portability. If you need to preserve formatting, convert to HTML instead; if you need the prose, plain text is exactly right.

Common use cases

• Plain-text email. Paste a Markdown draft into a client that does not render it, without literal asterisks and brackets showing up.
• Accurate word counts. Strip markup before counting words or measuring readability so symbols do not skew the numbers.
• Feeding other tools. Hand clean prose to a summarizer, translator, or text-to-speech engine that should not see markup.
• Database and CSV fields. Store the readable text where rendering is not available and raw Markdown would look broken.