Markdown Stripper

How to convert markdown to plain text

Paste the markdown on the left and the plain text appears on the right as you type. Headings lose their hashes, emphasis loses its asterisks, links become their text, and code fences disappear while the code inside them stays.

Three things you can change: what a link turns into, whether list markers survive, and whether fenced code blocks survive.

Why AI output arrives full of asterisks

Because models write markdown whether or not you asked for it. In a chat window that renders, so you see bold text and never see the syntax that made it.

Copy the same answer somewhere that does not parse markdown and the raw characters surface: **like this**, hashes in front of every heading, and brackets around every link. LinkedIn, X, most CMS fields, email clients, form inputs and note apps all fall into that group.

Why list markers stay by default

Because in a list, the marker is not decoration.

Strip the bullets from four items and you get four fragments running together with no signal that they were ever separate. The reader loses the structure the writer put there. So markers are kept, rewritten as a plain hyphen that survives anywhere.

Turn the switch off when you genuinely want a paragraph, for instance when you are pasting into something that adds its own bullets.

What the tool is careful about

Stripping markdown is a sequence of replacements, and the order decides whether the output is right. Four rules matter.

Code blocks are settled first. Their contents are literal, so an asterisk in a code sample is a multiplication sign, not emphasis.

Images are handled before links. They share a pattern, and going the other way leaves a stray exclamation mark behind.

Bold is handled before italic. Otherwise the double asterisk gets eaten one layer at a time and you keep a single one.

Escaped characters step aside first. A backslash exists to stop the next character being read as markup, so it has to be lifted out before anything else looks at the line.

Two things that survive on purpose: 2 * 3 * 4 keeps its operators, and snake_case_name keeps its underscores. Emphasis markers cannot sit against whitespace, and an underscore inside a word is a name rather than italics.

What usually needs fixing next

Markdown is rarely the only thing that came along. Model output carries curly quotes, em dashes and non-breaking spaces from the same source, and none of them show up until something downstream refuses them.

The AI text cleaner handles those in one pass. The smart quote converter is the narrower fix when only the quotes are in the way.

Everything runs in your browser. No account, no limit, nothing uploaded.