Remove formatting from text

Paste text and get plain text back. The tool strips bold and italic marks, HTML tags, curly quotes, hidden characters and extra blank lines. Free, no sign-up. Your text never leaves this page: the tool runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.

What to remove

Markdown marks: **bold**, *italic*, # headings, `code`, list dashes, [links](url) HTML tags (<b>, <p>, <a href>) and codes such as & Curly quotes to straight quotes Hidden zero-width characters and non-breaking spaces Extra blank lines and spaces at line ends

Your text

Result

What each option does

Option	What changes
Markdown marks	Removes the stars, underscores and tildes around bold, italic and struck-out words ("Budget" becomes "Budget"), heading hashes, quote arrows, list dashes at the start of a line, and backticks. A link written as [plan](https://example.com) becomes just "plan". Marks inside a word are left alone, so snake_case_name and 234 stay as they are.
HTML tags	Removes anything shaped like a tag, such as <p> or <a href="...">, and the text inside script and style tags. A line break tag or a closing paragraph tag becomes a new line. Codes such as & and " turn back into & and ". A lone "<" in "a < b" stays.
Curly quotes	Turns “ ” into " and ‘ ’ into '. Dashes and other symbols stay.
Hidden characters	Removes zero-width spaces and joiners, which are invisible but break searches. A non-breaking space becomes a normal space.
Blank lines	Two or more empty lines in a row become one. Spaces at the end of a line and empty lines at the start and end of the text go.

This tool cleans the markup that is written into the text. It cannot read bold or colour that only exists inside a copied Word or Google Docs document: when you paste such text into the box, the box already drops that look and keeps the words.

Remove formatting without a tool

In Google Docs, select the text and press Ctrl+\ (Cmd+\ on a Mac), or choose Format > Clear formatting. To paste without formatting, use Ctrl+Shift+V. This tool is for the other case: the marks are typed characters in the text, from Markdown, HTML or a chat app.

Is my text private?

Yes. The tool is one readable script, tool.js (no libraries), which works only on what is in the box. It makes no network requests and stores nothing; you can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it keeps working. Separately, the page sends one cookie-free page view count when it loads (the page address and the referring site, never your text; see privacy).

In Google Docs: ReplaceKit finds and replaces inside the document

Copying text out of a document and back loses its headings, bold and links. ReplaceKit, the Google Docs add-on we are building, finds and replaces in place, only in your selection if you want, with formatting kept and a preview of each match. The same cleanups are on the remove line breaks tool, the remove extra spaces tool and the case converter.

ReplaceKit is built and in testing. It is not in the Google Workspace Marketplace yet. Leave your email and we send one message when you can install it.

You're on the list. We'll email you when ReplaceKit is ready.

Free version: every find and replace, no click limit or trial clock.