Free HTML & Markdown Tools

Picking the right tool for the job

These three tools sit at different points in the same pipeline. Markdown to HTML goes forward (source text to markup), HTML to Text goes backward (markup to readable content), and the formatter changes whitespace without touching meaning. Pick the wrong direction and you get output that looks nearly right while quietly losing data.

• Minified or single-line markup from a build output that you need to read: HTML Formatter.
• A README, a CMS field, or notes in *.md that need to become markup: Markdown to HTML.
• A scraped page, a rendered email, or a CKEditor blob where you want the words without <div class="wrapper"> around them: HTML to Text.

Whitespace is not always cosmetic

Beautifying HTML is safe almost everywhere, with two exceptions. Inside <pre> and <textarea> every newline and space is content, so re-indenting those elements changes what renders. The second case is inline context: <span>one</span><span>two</span> renders as "onetwo", but split across two indented lines it renders as "one two", because the newline collapses to a single space. If a formatted layout suddenly gains gaps between buttons or list items, that is the cause, not your CSS.

What actually goes wrong

Markdown is not one specification

The original 2004 spec left many cases undefined, so implementations diverge. CommonMark pinned down the ambiguous ones; GitHub Flavored Markdown adds tables, strikethrough, task lists and autolinking on top. Pipe tables and ~~text~~ are GFM extensions, not core Markdown, so a converter producing plain CommonMark leaves them as literal text. Underscores inside identifiers are the other regular surprise: under the classic 2004 rules my_var_name compiles to my<em>var</em>name. CommonMark closed that hole by refusing underscore emphasis mid-word, and GFM inherits the rule because it is built on CommonMark, so the same input survives intact there. Backticks around the identifier work under every ruleset.

Raw HTML embedded in Markdown is a policy decision, not a bug. Some converters pass it through, some escape it. If your <details> block arrives on the page as visible angle brackets, you hit an escaping converter, and the fix is to allow HTML rather than rewrite the source.

Stripping tags is lossy on purpose

Text extraction makes judgement calls the markup does not answer. Does <br> become a newline? Does a table become tab-separated columns or one run-on line? Do you keep the href from an anchor, or only its label? Check those three before trusting the output. Confirm entities were decoded too: & or ' surviving into plain text means a decode pass was skipped. Content inside <script> and <style> should vanish entirely, and if JavaScript shows up in your text the extractor is regex-based rather than parser-based.

Common questions

Does anything I paste get uploaded? No. These tools run as JavaScript in your tab, so the markup never leaves the browser. That matters when the page you are cleaning up holds a customer name, an internal URL or a token in a data attribute. Open DevTools, keep the Network panel recording while you press the button, and no request carries what you pasted.

Will formatting change how my page renders? Not for block-level markup. It can for inline elements sitting flush against each other, and for anything inside <pre>, where whitespace is content. Compare before and after in a browser if your markup contains either.

My accented characters came out as mojibake. What happened? Something upstream read UTF-8 bytes as Windows-1252. In UTF-8, é is the two bytes C3 A9; decoded one byte at a time as Windows-1252 they become Ã and ©, which is the é on your screen. The corruption happened before the paste, so the tool is showing you exactly what it was handed. Re-save the source as UTF-8 and copy it again.

Can I convert HTML back to Markdown here? Not with these three. HTML to Text gives you content without markup, which is the right input if you are rewriting the structure anyway, but it drops headings and links rather than translating them into # and []() syntax.

Why use these?

Markdown has become the universal authoring format for technical content — GitHub, GitLab, every modern documentation framework, every static site generator, most modern note-taking apps. HTML is the universal rendering format. Moving fluently between them is essential for anyone working with content management systems, blogs, READMEs or documentation pipelines.