HTML to Plain Text: Strip Tags and Handle Entities
Convert HTML to plain text: strip tags cleanly, decode HTML entities, preserve paragraph breaks and list structure for readable output.
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Tags: html, text, conversion
HTML to Plain Text: Strip Tags, Preserve Structure, and Handle Entities Converting HTML to plain text sounds trivial until you try it. Strip the tags and you're left with text smashed together with no line breaks, HTML entities like and still intact, link URLs gone, and table data unreadable. The goal isn't just removing tags — it's producing readable text that preserves the structure the HTML was encoding. This guide covers the specific techniques for handling block elements, entities, links, and tables when converting to plain text. The Wrong Way: Regex Strip The naive approach removes tags with a regex: This produces something like: Everything runs together because the block element boundaries (, , ) that imply line breaks in the browser are gone. Entities are still encoded ( instead…
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