Remove formatting
Strip HTML, rich-text residue, non-breaking spaces, and typographic decorations without rewriting the words.
How to use remove formatting
This is the reliable version of "paste without formatting": tags, entity codes, and non-breaking spaces come off, the words stay. It accepts pasted rich text and raw HTML source alike.
- 1Paste the formatted text or its HTML
Copied rich text arrives in the editor as its plain-text form, often still carrying non-breaking spaces and entity residue; pasted HTML source arrives with its tags intact. The tool handles both — tags are stripped, entities are decoded, and the leftover characters cleaned up.
- 2Choose whether structure survives
Preserve block structure keeps a line break where the source had a paragraph, heading, list item, or table row, so a bulleted list stays a list. Untick it and only the text’s own line breaks remain.
- 3Clean and paste where it is going
Select Clean text, then Copy. The result is pure plain text, so pasting it into a CMS or an email editor picks up the destination’s styling instead of importing the source’s.
When this tool is useful
What is stripped, what is decoded, what is kept
Tags are removed through a real HTML parser rather than a regular expression, so nested markup, attributes, and unclosed tags all come off cleanly. With block structure on, each paragraph, heading, list-item, table-row, and line-break tag leaves a line break behind — which is what keeps a list from collapsing into one long sentence.
Entity codes are decoded rather than deleted: "&" becomes an ampersand, and " " becomes an ordinary space instead of the non-breaking one it encodes. Non-breaking spaces already sitting in the text are converted too — the single biggest cause of paste that looks fine and behaves oddly.
Whitespace is then normalised gently: runs of spaces and tabs collapse to one space, and runs of blank lines collapse to a single blank line, so paragraph separation survives while the vertical sprawl goes. The words themselves are never rewritten — curly quotes and em dashes stay, since they are characters rather than formatting; the AI text cleaner is the pass that converts those.
Remove formatting questions
Same goal, more thorough. Paste-without-formatting drops fonts and colours but keeps non-breaking spaces and entity residue in the text. This tool also decodes entities, converts non-breaking spaces to real ones, and tidies the whitespace the formatting left behind.
Yes. Markup goes through a real HTML parser, so tags and attributes are removed correctly even when nested or unclosed. For pulling readable copy out of a full page — scripts, navigation and all — the HTML to text tool gives more control.
Preserve block structure was off. With it on, each list item, paragraph, heading, and table row keeps a line of its own.
No. Those are characters, not formatting, and some destinations want them kept. When you do want them gone, the AI text cleaner straightens quotes and replaces em dashes with your choice of substitute.
No. Every visible word survives in order. Only markup, entity codes, non-breaking spaces, and redundant whitespace are affected.