Can I extract text from PDFs or other documents?

Only HTML pages are supported. PDFs, Word documents, and other binary formats require different tooling. We may add PDF support in the future - let us know if you'd find it useful.

Free online tool - No installation required

HTML Text Extractor

Q: What's the difference between HTML and text?

HTML is the markup language that wraps content in tags ( , , , , etc.) so browsers know how to display it. Text is just the human-readable content inside those tags. When you 'extract text' from HTML, you're stripping away the tags, scripts, and styling to keep only the words a reader would actually see on the page.

Q: Does this include text added by JavaScript?

No. The extractor works on the raw HTML returned by the server, before any client-side JavaScript runs. For pages built as single-page apps (React, Vue, Angular), content inserted after load by JavaScript won't be in the extracted text.

Q: Is this the same as a browser's Reader Mode?

The goal is similar - give you a distraction-free version of the page's content - but the method differs. Reader Mode uses DOM heuristics to guess which part of the page is the main article and hides the rest. Our extractor works on raw HTML and strips non-content elements like scripts and styles, keeping the full text of the document. You get more text, with less intelligence about which part is the 'article' body.

Q: What exactly gets removed vs kept?

Removed: script, style, noscript, svg, iframe, object, and embed elements, along with all tag markup itself and head content (meta, link, title). Kept: the visible text of paragraphs, headings, list items, links, table cells, and any other text-bearing element inside the body. Whitespace is normalized so you don't get huge runs of blank lines.

Q: Why would I use this for SEO?

Search engines index the textual content of a page. By extracting just the text, you can audit keyword density, check that your most important content is server-rendered, measure word count, and confirm that navigation and boilerplate aren't drowning the real content.

Extract clean, readable text from any website. View the HTML source code side-by-side with the extracted text content.

source.html

extracted-text.txt

⚡Page Speed

🖥Server Info

📄Page Info

Overview

What text extraction from HTML means

Strip away tags, scripts, and styles. Keep the words. Get the same content a reader would see - as plain text.

Every web page is a mix of two things: markup - the HTML tags that tell a browser how to structure and display content - and content itself, the words, numbers, and characters a reader actually sees. When you view the source of a page, most of what you see is markup: opening and closing tags, class names, script blocks, inline styles, and meta data. The readable content is tucked in between all that.

The HTML Text Extractor does one job: pull the readable content out and throw the rest away. Paste any public URL, and you get back a clean, plain-text version of the page - no tags, no scripts, no stylesheets, no navigation noise. The original HTML stays visible side-by-side so you can compare, verify, and pick out what you need.

Because extraction happens server-side on the raw HTML response, you get exactly what a search engine crawler would first index - before client-side JavaScript has a chance to add anything. For SEO audits, content inventory, translation prep, and AI/ML training data, that's usually the version you want.

Use Cases

When you'd want to extract text from HTML

From content audits to distraction-free reading - here's who uses text extraction and why.

📝

Content Audits

Count words, measure reading time, check keyword density, and evaluate whether your page's textual body actually reflects the topic you're targeting.

🌐

Translation Prep

Hand translators clean source text without the HTML noise that breaks their tools or costs them extra time to filter out manually.

📖

Distraction-Free Reading

Pull an article out of a cluttered page with popups, sidebars, and ads. Drop it into a notes app, Kindle, or read-later tool.

♿

Accessibility Review

Get a rough sense of what a screen reader would encounter on the page - essential for checking reading order and content priorities.

📊

SEO Content Analysis

Confirm your main content is server-rendered (visible to crawlers), check keyword presence on the body text, and spot boilerplate-to-content ratios.

🤖

AI/ML Training Data

Build clean text corpora from public web pages for fine-tuning language models, search systems, or content classifiers - without stripping tags yourself.

Behavior

What gets kept, what gets stripped

Clear rules so you know exactly what you're getting and what you're losing.

✓ Kept

Paragraph text
Heading text (h1 through h6)
List items (ul, ol)
Link anchor text
Table cell text
Blockquote and cite text
Form label and button text
All visible body textContent

✗ Stripped

All HTML tags themselves
<script> blocks and their contents
<style> blocks and inline CSS
<noscript> content
<svg>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed>
Meta tags and head content
Image alt attributes
Dynamic JavaScript-rendered text

Whitespace is normalized: runs of spaces, tabs, and newlines are collapsed so you don't end up with huge blank gaps from the original HTML indentation. Paragraph breaks are preserved where the markup implied them.

How it works

Five steps under the hood

What happens between pasting a URL and seeing the extracted text.

Fetch the page server-sideOur server requests the URL directly. No JavaScript is executed - we get the raw HTML response sent by the origin.
Parse the HTML into a treeA proper HTML parser builds a DOM-like tree from the markup, handling edge cases like malformed tags, missing closes, and nested inline elements.
Prune non-content branchesScript, style, noscript, and comment nodes are deleted before extraction so their contents never make it into the output.
Read all text nodesWe pull the textContent of the body, which concatenates every text node in document order - you get the words a reader would see.
Normalize and displayRuns of whitespace are collapsed, consecutive blank lines are merged, and the result is shown side-by-side with the source HTML along with word and character counts.

Alternatives

HTML Text Extractor vs. other approaches

How this tool compares with browser Reader Mode, libraries, and manual extraction.

Approach	Best for	Trade-offs
This tool	Quick one-off extraction, side-by-side comparison, any device	Server-rendered text only (no JS-rendered content)
Browser Reader Mode	Distraction-free reading of a single article	Uses guessing heuristics; can miss or mis-identify the article body
Copy-paste from browser	Grabbing a short snippet visually	Tedious for full pages; can inherit hidden styles; misses content outside viewport
`readability-js` / Mercury Parser	Scripted, article-focused extraction in Node apps	Requires a codebase to wire up; article-only focus
BeautifulSoup / Cheerio	Custom Python/JS scrapers with specific rules	Developer time to write and maintain selectors per site
curl + pandoc / html2text	CLI pipelines on a dev machine	Terminal-only; installation and configuration overhead

For most people - content teams, SEOs, translators, researchers - the fastest route from URL to clean text is a hosted extractor. Pick a library or write custom code only when you need programmatic repetition, article-body-only extraction, or site-specific rules that generic tools can't handle.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about extracting text from HTML pages.

What's the difference between HTML and text?

HTML is the markup language that wraps content in tags (<p>, <h1>, <a>, <div>, etc.) so browsers know how to display it. Text is just the human-readable content inside those tags. When you "extract text" from HTML, you strip away tags, scripts, and styling to keep only the words a reader would actually see on the page.

Does this include text added by JavaScript?

No. The extractor runs on the raw HTML returned by the server, before any client-side JavaScript executes. For single-page apps built on React, Vue, or Angular, content inserted after load won't appear in the extracted text. If a page's main content is only rendered client-side, you'll typically see a mostly-empty result.

Is this the same as a browser's Reader Mode?

The goal is similar - a distraction-free view of a page's content - but the method differs. Reader Mode uses DOM heuristics to guess which part of the page is the main article and hides the rest. Our extractor strips non-content elements like scripts and styles and keeps the full text of the document. You get more text, with less intelligence about which part is the "article" body.

What exactly gets removed vs kept?

Removed: <script>, <style>, <noscript>, <svg>, <iframe>, <object>, and <embed> elements along with all tag markup itself. Head content (meta tags, link tags, title) is also excluded.

Kept: the visible text of paragraphs, headings, list items, links, table cells, and any other text-bearing element inside the body. Whitespace is normalized so you don't get huge runs of blank lines.

Can I extract text from non-English pages?

Yes. UTF-8 encoding is preserved, so Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, emoji, and most other scripts come through correctly. We don't translate - you get the text in the original language.

Can I extract text from PDFs or Word documents?

Only HTML pages are supported. PDFs and other binary formats need different tooling. Let us know via Twitter if you'd find PDF support useful - we're gauging demand.

Why would I use this for SEO?

Search engines primarily index the textual content of a page. Extracting just the text lets you audit keyword density, confirm that your most important content is server-rendered (visible to crawlers on first fetch), measure word counts, and check that navigation and footer boilerplate aren't drowning out your real content.

Can I download the extracted text?

Yes. Use the Download button next to the extracted text panel to save it as a .txt file. The Copy button puts it on your clipboard.

Is my data private?

We don't store your queries or tie extractions to your identity. Responses are cached briefly for performance. Full details in our privacy policy.