Remove Markdown Formatting

How to use this tool

1. Paste your Markdown into the Markdown box, or press "Try an example" to see how it works.
2. Read the result in the Plain text box. It updates as you type.
3. Choose how bullet points look, whether link addresses stay, and whether wrapped lines are joined.
4. Press "Copy plain text", or download the result as a .txt file.

What the converter removes, and what it keeps

The tool removes the symbols that Markdown uses for formatting and keeps every word. Each result below was produced by the converter itself with the default options.

## Results

Results

**Done** and *nearly*

Done and nearly

~~draft~~ final

draft final

[CommonMark](https://commonmark.org/)

CommonMark (https://commonmark.org/)

Run `npm test`

Run npm test

- milk
- eggs

• milk
• eggs

- [ ] call
- [x] email

• ☐ call
• ☑ email

1. Plan
2. Write

1. Plan
2. Write

> Measure twice

Measure twice

| Item | Qty |
|---|---|
| Pens | 4 |

Item ⇥ Qty
Pens ⇥ 4

2 * 3 * 4 and my_file_v2

2 * 3 * 4 and my_file_v2

\*literally\*

*literally*

Why AI answers are full of asterisks and pound signs

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and most other AI chats write their answers in Markdown, a lightweight way of marking up text: two asterisks around a word make it bold, a pound sign at the start of a line makes a heading, and a hyphen starts a bullet point. The chat window draws that markup as formatting, so you never see it there. Copy the answer into an email, a support ticket, a social post or a content management system that expects plain text, though, and the symbols come along with the words.

Deleting them with find and replace is slower than it looks. An asterisk can be formatting or a multiplication sign, an underscore can be italics or part of a file name, and a pound sign can be a heading or a hashtag. This tool reads the text the way a Markdown renderer does, following the CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown rules, so it removes only the characters that really are formatting.

The options

• Bullet points. Keep a round bullet (•), use a plain hyphen for systems that only accept basic characters, or drop the marker entirely. Numbered lists always keep their numbers, and nested items stay indented under their parent.
• Keep link addresses. When this is on, a link becomes its text followed by the address in brackets, so nothing is lost. Turn it off when you only want the readable text. A link whose text already is the address is written once.
• Join wrapped lines. Some Markdown, such as a README file, breaks every paragraph into short lines. Markdown displays those lines as one paragraph, and this option does the same, which suits emails and word processors. Leave it off for answers from AI chats, which do not wrap their lines.

Where clean text helps

Plain text is the safe choice wherever formatting is not understood: email bodies and replies, LinkedIn and other social posts, support tickets, form fields, text messages, chat apps and the plain-text fields of a content management system. Tables are written as tab-separated rows, so they paste into a spreadsheet as separate columns.

Private by design

Everything happens on your device. The converter is part of this page, so there is no upload, no account and no copy of your text on anyone's server. That matters when the answer you are cleaning contains client details, draft contracts or anything else you would not paste into a stranger's website.

Limits

• It removes formatting; it does not keep it. If you want bold to stay bold in a Word document, you need a Markdown to Word converter rather than plain text.
• Equations written in LaTeX are not rendered. They stay as written, except that a backslash in front of a bracket is dropped, exactly as a Markdown renderer would drop it.
• HTML inside the Markdown is reduced to its text: tags and comments are removed, and only line-break tags become line breaks.
• Tables become tab-separated rows, which line up in a spreadsheet but can look uneven in an email.