Markdown Remover (Markdown to Plain Text)

Markdown is great for writing but looks messy when pasted into an email, a form, a word processor or a plain-text field: asterisks, hashes, brackets and pipes everywhere. This converter reads the Markdown properly, with a real Markdown parser rather than a few search-and-replace rules, and writes clean, readable text: headings and emphasis become plain words, links keep their text (and optionally the URL), images keep their alt text, lists stay as lists and tables become tab-separated rows. BBCode tags from forums are removed too.

How to use this tool

1. Paste your Markdown or BBCode.
2. Choose how to show links (text only or text with the URL) and images.
3. Decide whether to keep code blocks and list markers.
4. Copy the plain text.

Formula

Plain text = the text content of every Markdown element, with block elements separated by blank lines

The text is parsed with the marked library (CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown, including tables and task lists) and the resulting elements are written out as text. Inline HTML tags are removed and HTML entities such as & are turned back into characters. Nested lists are indented by two spaces, task items keep [ ] and [x], and block quotes lose their >. BBCode is handled before parsing: [b], [i], [quote], [color] and similar tags are dropped, [url=…] keeps its text and [img] is removed.

Example

The default weekly update becomes “Weekly update”, then “We shipped three fixes and one new feature. Read the release notes.”, the list “- Review the config.yml changes” and “- [x] Update the docs”, a tab-separated table (Task, Owner / Tests, Ana) and “Remember: Friday is a holiday.” without the quote marker.