Convert Markdown to plain text

When Markdown symbols get in the way

Markdown is a light way of formatting text with punctuation: hashes for headings, asterisks for bold and italics, backticks for code, brackets for links. It looks tidy in an editor that renders it, but pasted into an email, a text field or a document that does not understand it, you are left with stray ##, ** and [text](https://…) everywhere. This is especially common with the answers of AI assistants, which are written in Markdown by default.

What gets converted

• Headings lose their leading hashes and their underline style (===, ---).
• Bold, italics and strike-through lose their asterisks, underscores and tildes, while underscores inside words such as snake_case and multiplication signs such as 2*3 are left alone.
• Links become just the link text, or the text followed by the address in brackets. Images become their description, and automatic links keep their address.
• Code loses its backticks and code fences, and the code itself is kept as text.
• Lists keep their bullets as a dash, or lose them if you turn the option off. Numbered lists are kept as they are, because their numbers are part of the content.
• Quotes, rules and tables lose their symbols; table cells are separated by tabs so they paste into a spreadsheet.
• HTML tags and comments inside the Markdown are removed, and escaped characters such as \* are restored.

Line breaks stay

Paragraphs and line breaks are preserved, and runs of more than one blank line are reduced to one, so the structure of the text is still recognisable once the marks are gone.

What it does not do

Markdown has many dialects and edge cases, and the conversion is a practical clean-up rather than a full parser. Very unusual constructions, nested formatting inside links and raw HTML blocks may not come out perfectly, so glance over the result. It does not render the Markdown, and it does not turn a table into aligned columns.