All tools (39)
Markdown to Plain Text
Strip Markdown formatting and keep only the words.
Paste Markdown to strip its formatting.
Strip Markdown down to the words
Removes headings' hashes, emphasis asterisks, link brackets, code fences, blockquote markers and list bullets, and leaves the text.
Why this beats a find-and-replace
Markdown is context-sensitive. An asterisk inside a fenced code block is not emphasis; an underscore inside a URL is not italics; a hash in a comment is not a heading. This tool renders the Markdown properly first and then reads the text out of the result, so those cases come out right instead of being mangled by a regex.
Options
- Keep link URLs in brackets turns
[the docs](https://example.com)intothe docs (https://example.com). Off, only the label survives - which is usually what you want for a word count and rarely what you want for an email. - Collapse blank lines squashes runs of empty lines down to one, for pasting into fields that do not handle them well.
Common uses
- Getting an accurate word count for a README or a post.
- Pasting release notes into a plain-text email or a changelog field.
- Feeding documentation into a tool that expects unformatted text.
Related tools
- Markdown to HTML - render it instead of stripping it.
- HTML to Plain Text - the same idea, for HTML.