Copy your text
From a web page, Word, Google Docs, an email or a PDF.
Remove formatting from copied text
Copy from a web page, a document or an email and paste here. You get clean plain text, with the paragraphs and lists kept if you want them, and a note of the formatting that was removed.
- Free
- No sign-up
- Runs in your browser
100% private — your text is converted in your browser and never sent to any server.
How it works
Paste it here
Use Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac) or the paste button. Choose how to treat breaks and links.
Copy the plain text
Paste it anywhere without bringing fonts, colours or links along.
Why copied text carries baggage
When you copy text from a web page or a document, you do not only copy the words. The clipboard also holds an HTML version with the font, size, colour, background, links, tables and sometimes hidden styles. Paste it into an email, a slide or a CMS and that baggage comes along: a different font from the rest of the page, a grey background from the site you copied from, a stray link, or strange spacing that no amount of clicking removes. Pasting as plain text solves the problem, but not every program makes it easy.
What this tool does
Paste your copied text and the tool reads what the clipboard holds, in a safe way that never inserts it into the page, and rebuilds it as plain text. You choose how much structure to keep:
- Paragraphs: keep a blank line between paragraphs and headings, use a single line break everywhere, or join everything into one paragraph, which is handy for text copied from a PDF with a break at the end of each line.
- Lists: keep the bullets as a dash and the numbers of numbered lists, or drop them.
- Links: keep only the link text, or add the address in brackets after it, so the destination is not lost.
- Tables: cells are separated by tabs, so a table pasted into a spreadsheet lands in the right columns.
- Spaces: non-breaking spaces become normal spaces and repeated spaces are collapsed.
See what was removed
Below the result, the tool lists the formatting it found and removed: links, images, tables, lists, headings, bold and italic runs and styled elements. If the text was already plain, it tells you that as well, so you know whether formatting was the source of your problem.
Why not simply paste into a plain text box?
A plain text box does strip the formatting, but it also flattens the structure: the bullets of a list, the cells of a table and the separation between paragraphs are often lost or mangled, and the address of a link disappears. This tool decides what to do with each of these, and you control it.
What it does not do
It does not keep images or the layout of a page, since plain text cannot hold them, and it cannot read text that is inside an image. Some sources give the clipboard only plain text, in which case there is no formatting to remove and the text is just tidied. Copying from a PDF depends on how the PDF was made and may still need cleaning: see the text cleaner for broken lines and hidden characters.
Frequently asked questions
How do I paste text without formatting?
Copy the text, click in the box on this page and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac), or press the paste button. The plain text appears on the right.
Does it keep my paragraphs and lists?
Yes, if you choose to. Paragraphs stay separated by a blank line and list items keep a dash or their number. You can also flatten everything.
What happens to links?
By default only the link text is kept. Choose "Add the address after the link text" to keep the destination as well.
What is the difference from pasting into Notepad?
Notepad removes the formatting but also flattens the structure. Here you decide how to keep paragraphs, lists, tables and link addresses.
Can I convert a table to text?
Yes. Table cells are separated by tabs, and each row is a line, so it pastes cleanly into a spreadsheet.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion happens in your browser, and the pasted HTML is never inserted into the page.
Related tools
More utilities that also run without leaving your browser.
Remove punctuation from textDelete commas, full stops, quotes and other punctuation marks from a text.
Reverse the order of linesFlip a list upside down, reverse each line's words or mirror its letters.
See spaces, tabs and hidden charactersMake the invisible parts of a text visible: spaces, tabs, line breaks and hidden characters.
Clean text: remove extra spaces and hidden charactersStrip extra spaces, odd line breaks and invisible characters in one go.
Remove duplicate lines from a listKeep one copy of each line, or find only the lines that repeat.
Anonymise a text before sharing itHide emails, phone numbers, IBANs, cards, IDs and names in a text before sharing it.