Markdown to plain text cleaner
Strip the Markdown from a ChatGPT or Claude answer — asterisks, hashes, pipes, fences — and keep the text, lists and tables readable.
Input
Result
The result will appear here.AI assistants answer in Markdown, and pasted into an email, a chat app, a Word document or a form field, that answer arrives covered in ** and ## and | characters. This tool removes the markup and keeps the content. It reads the text with the lexer of marked (markedjs/marked, MIT), a widely used Markdown parser, so it knows the difference between an asterisk that means bold and one inside a formula or a code snippet — something find-and-replace cannot do.
How it works
- Headings lose their hashes, bold, italic and strikethrough lose their markers, and quote markers and horizontal rules are removed.
- Lists keep their numbers or dashes and their indentation, and task lists keep [x] and [ ], so the structure survives as plain text.
- Tables become tab-separated rows, which paste straight into Excel or Google Sheets as cells; code blocks lose their fences but keep every character of the code.
- Links become "text (URL)" or just the text, images become their alt text, HTML tags are stripped and entities such as & are decoded.
Where your data goes
Nowhere. This tool runs entirely in your browser: the text you paste is processed by the page and is never transmitted to a server or written to a log.
This tool is free and needs no account. Its results exist only in your open page and are not saved anywhere.
What it costs
This tool is free, with no sign-in and no points.
Common questions
- Why not just delete every * and #?
- Because they also mean things: 5*3, C#, a #hashtag, a glob like **/*.ts in a code block. The tool only removes characters the Markdown parser has identified as formatting, so text that merely looks like Markdown is left exactly as it was.
- Can I keep the formatting when pasting into Word or Google Docs?
- This tool is for places that take plain text only. For rich text, convert the Markdown to HTML instead — the Markdown to HTML converter on this site does that — and paste the rendered page, which Word and Google Docs take with headings, bold and tables intact.
- What happens to LaTeX formulas?
- Markdown has no maths syntax, so the parser does not know a formula is one. Dollar signs and most of the formula stay, but a pair of asterisks inside it is read as italics and removed, and backslash escapes such as \, lose their backslash. If the answer is full of maths, ask the model for plain notation such as x^2 + y^2 instead.
The open-source behind it
This tool runs on markedjs/marked, released under MIT. If you need the same behaviour inside your own program, that is the library to reach for.
markedjs/markedAlso known as
- remove markdown
- markdown to plain text
- strip markdown formatting
- remove asterisks from chatgpt
- clean ai text
- markdown remover