HTML to Markdown converter

What it keeps

Headings, bold and italic, links, images, ordered and unordered lists including nested ones, blockquotes, inline code, preformatted blocks, horizontal rules and tables. Structure is what makes the difference between Markdown and a wall of text, so structure is what it preserves.

What it removes on purpose

Script and style blocks go entirely, contents and all. So does a link with a javascript: or data: destination: Markdown renderers turn those back into live links, so carrying one through would make this tool a laundering step for something that should not survive.

Escaping

Markdown gives meaning to asterisks, underscores, backticks, brackets and several other characters. Prose containing them is escaped so it survives as prose rather than silently becoming formatting. A backtick inside inline code is handled by fencing it with a longer run, which is how Markdown itself solves that.

How it parses

It uses the browser's own HTML parser in inert mode, so nothing in the input executes and no image, stylesheet or iframe is fetched while converting. A converter built on regular expressions cannot understand nesting, and one built on innerHTML runs whatever it was given.

Example

<h2>Title</h2><p><strong>bold</strong> text</p> becomes ## Title followed by **bold** text.

Limitations

Markdown has no equivalent for many HTML constructs. Definition lists, nested tables, colspans, form controls and arbitrary attributes have no representation and are flattened to their text. Complex page layouts convert to readable prose, not to a faithful copy.

Related tools

See remove HTML tags when you want text with no formatting at all, and the rich text HTML editor.