HTML Stripper

Why Remove HTML Tags from Strings?

HTML tags clutter text data with angle-bracketed markup like div, span, p, strong, br, and a that interfere with data analysis, natural language processing, and text display. When web scraping, importing data from CMS platforms, or extracting content from emails, residual HTML creates noise that skews word counts, breaks CSV parsing, and makes text unreadable for end users. Developers writing Python data pipelines, SQL queries, or JavaScript processing scripts need clean text without the overhead of parsing HTML in code—our browser-based tool handles this instantly.

Excel users frequently encounter HTML when importing web data, exporting CRM records, or receiving email campaign analytics where product descriptions, email bodies, and user-generated content contain embedded formatting. Manually removing tags cell-by-cell is impractical for hundreds or thousands of rows. Our tool processes any volume of HTML text, preserving paragraph structure through optional line break conversion while stripping all markup. This is essential for data cleanup before pivot tables, VLOOKUP operations, or dashboard visualization where HTML artifacts would corrupt formulas and display.

Database administrators dealing with legacy systems or content migrations face HTML-laden text columns that need cleaning for full-text search indexing (MySQL FULLTEXT, PostgreSQL tsvector) or analytics queries. SQL's built-in string functions require complex nested REPLACE statements to handle multiple tag types, while our tool strips all tags in one operation. For developers implementing text preprocessing for machine learning, sentiment analysis, or keyword extraction, HTML removal is a critical first step—models trained on raw HTML perform poorly compared to clean text inputs.

How the HTML Tag Stripper Works

• 1.Tag Detection & Removal - The tool uses regex pattern matching to identify all HTML tags enclosed in angle brackets: opening tags (<div>, <span>), closing tags (</div>, </p>), self-closing tags (<br />, <img />), and tags with attributes (<a href="...">). All detected tags are stripped, leaving only text content between tags.
• 2.Line Break Preservation - Before removing tags, the tool optionally converts <br>, <br />, and <p> tags into actual line breaks to maintain paragraph structure. Without this, all text would collapse into one continuous string. Enable this option for readability; disable for pure text extraction where line breaks don't matter (e.g., keyword analysis, word clouds).
• 3.HTML Entity Decoding - After tag removal, the tool decodes HTML entities like &nbsp; (non-breaking space), &lt; (less than), &gt; (greater than), &amp; (ampersand), and &quot; (quotation mark). This uses the browser's native DOMParser for safe, accurate conversion of all standard entities plus numeric character references (’ for smart quotes, © for copyright symbol).
• 4.Cleanup & Privacy - Final post-processing removes excessive consecutive line breaks (3+ becomes 2), trims whitespace from each line, and removes leading/trailing spaces. All processing happens client-side in your browser with no server upload—ideal for confidential data, proprietary code strings, or sensitive customer information that can't leave your machine.

Tips for Best Results

• 1.Enable both options for Excel data - When cleaning HTML from Excel cells, enable "Convert line breaks" to maintain paragraph structure and "Decode HTML entities" for fully clean text. After stripping tags, use Trim Lines to remove extra indentation before pasting back into Excel.
• 2.For Python/JavaScript string processing - Paste your scraped HTML strings here to clean them without writing regex code. Copy the cleaned output into your code as a string constant or save it for further processing. This is faster than debugging regex patterns and handles edge cases (nested tags, malformed HTML) automatically.
• 3.Clean SQL query results - Export HTML-containing database columns to CSV or text, paste into the tool, then use Remove Empty Lines to compact output. For bulk database updates, clean a sample first to verify results before writing UPDATE queries.
• 4Check the tag removal counter - The tool displays how many tags were removed. If the count is 0 for suspected HTML, verify you pasted raw HTML source (view-source in browser) rather than rendered text. Browsers auto-strip tags when copying from rendered pages—use "View Page Source" or "Inspect Element" to get raw HTML.