HTML to Markdown Converter

What is HTML to Markdown?

Markdown(created by John Gruber, 2004) is a lightweight markup language used for documentation, README files, blog posts, and static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, Astro, Docusaurus). Converting HTML → Markdown produces clean, readable plain-text content that’s easy to edit and version-control with Git.

Common scenarios: migrating from WordPress / Ghost / Medium to a Markdown-based site, extracting article content from web pages for note-taking apps (Obsidian, Notion), cleaning up HTML email content for plain-text alternatives, converting Confluence / SharePoint exports to Markdown for developer docs.

How to Use

1. Paste HTML code into the input area, or upload a .html file.
2. Click Convert.
3. Review the Markdown output — verify lists, code blocks, and headings render correctly.
4. Copy or download as a .md file.

Privacy: Conversion runs entirely in your browser. No uploads.

Conversion mapping

<h1>Title</h1>           → # Title
<h2>Subhead</h2>         → ## Subhead
<strong>bold</strong>    → **bold**
<em>italic</em>          → *italic*
<a href="url">text</a>   → [text](url)
<img src="..." alt="x"/> → ![x](...)
<ul><li>item</li></ul>   → - item
<ol><li>item</li></ol>   → 1. item
<blockquote>quote</blockquote> → > quote
<code>inline</code>      → `inline`
<pre><code>block</code></pre> → ```\nblock\n```
<hr/>                    → ---
<br/>                    → (line break)

What gets stripped

• CSS classes / inline styles — Markdown is content-focused; styling lives in CSS
• JavaScript attributes (onclick, onload) — security and Markdown doesn’t support them
• Embedded scripts and iframes — converted to nothing or skipped; manually re-add HTML in Markdown if needed
• SVG and complex media — kept as raw HTML inside Markdown (Markdown allows raw HTML)
• Form elements (input, button, select) — Markdown has no form syntax

Alternative tools for advanced needs

• Pandoc — gold standard CLI; supports many input/output formats with custom templates
• Turndown (npm) — JavaScript library, customizable rules, used by many tools
• html2text (Python) — simple Python script for batch processing
• Markdownify (Python) — feature-rich Python library
• Browser extensions — “Copy as Markdown” extensions for Chrome/Firefox

Stripping a Page Back to Its Structure

HTML carries presentation as well as content: nested divs for layout, class names for styling, inline styles, tracking attributes, and often a great deal of markup that exists only to satisfy a CSS framework. Markdown carries almost none of that. Converting is essentially an act of discarding everything except structure and text.

That is exactly why it is useful. Pasting web content into a CMS, a documentation repository, a static site generator, or an AI prompt works far better when it arrives as clean Markdown than as a wall of nested divs with inherited styles that fight your own.

What Maps Cleanly and What Cannot

Headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, links, images, ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, code blocks, and horizontal rules all have direct Markdown equivalents and convert reliably.

Tables convert to the pipe syntax, though only simple ones survive intact — a cell spanning two columns has no Markdown representation at all, so complex tables come out flattened or misaligned.

Everything presentational disappears: colours, fonts, alignment, sizing, background images, and layout. Forms, buttons, scripts, iframes, and video embeds have no equivalent and are dropped. Nested lists usually survive; deeply nested mixtures sometimes lose a level.

One useful property: because Markdown has no way to express scripts or event handlers, converting to Markdown is a genuinely effective way to strip active content out of copied HTML.

FAQ