HTML to Markdown

What is the HTML to Markdown converter?

The HTML to Markdown converter is a free online tool that turns a block of HTML into clean, readable Markdown. You paste markup copied from a webpage, a CMS export, a rich-text editor, or an email, and the tool rewrites it as the lightweight Markdown syntax that powers READMEs, GitHub issues, static-site blog posts, documentation, and wikis. Instead of a wall of angle brackets you get the simple, portable text format that developers and writers actually want to commit and edit.

The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so your HTML never leaves your device. That matters when the page you are converting is an unpublished draft, an internal document, or content under an agreement you would rather not leave on someone else's machine. Nothing is uploaded, logged, or saved.

How to use it

1. Paste your HTML into the input box on the left (or top, on a phone).
2. The Markdown appears beside it the instant you stop typing — there is no Convert button to hunt for.
3. Click Copy to put the Markdown on your clipboard, or Download .md to save it straight to a file.
4. Close the tab when you are done; nothing is stored.

The method behind it

The tool parses your HTML with the browser's built-in parser and then walks the resulting document tree node by node, mapping each element to its Markdown equivalent. Headings, emphasis, lists, links, and tables each have a dedicated rule, while whitespace between inline elements is collapsed the same way a browser collapses it on screen. Characters that are special in Markdown but appear as literal text in your HTML are escaped with a backslash so they display as written. Because the whole pipeline is a deterministic transform over the parsed tree, the same HTML always produces the same Markdown.

What it preserves

A good conversion keeps structure, not just words. This tool maps each element to its Markdown equivalent:

• Headings <h1>–<h6> become # through ######.
• <strong>/<b> become bold and <em>/<i> become italic; <del>/<s> become strikethrough.
• Ordered and unordered lists, including nested lists, keep their indentation and numbering.
• Links become bracket-and-parenthesis syntax and images keep their alt text and source, titles included when present.
• Blockquotes become quote lines, horizontal rules become three dashes, inline code keeps its backticks, and a code block carries the language hint when the code element has a language class.
• Tables become a GitHub-Flavored Markdown pipe table with an aligned header row.

Visual-only or unknown tags such as <span> and <div> degrade gracefully to their text content rather than being dropped or breaking the layout, and script and style blocks are stripped.

Examples

• Paste a heading followed by a paragraph with inline code and bold text, and you get a Markdown heading line followed by a paragraph that uses backticks and double asterisks.
• Paste a list with two items and you get two lines that each begin with a dash, ready to drop into a README.
• Paste an HTML table and you get a pipe table with a dashed separator row, which renders correctly on GitHub and most Markdown viewers.

Common use cases

• Developers moving content from a website or HTML email into a README or a GitHub issue.
• Technical writers migrating docs out of a WYSIWYG CMS into a Markdown-based docs site.
• Bloggers converting an old HTML post for an Astro, Hugo, or Jekyll static site.
• Note-takers dropping web clippings into Obsidian, Notion, or a plain-text vault.

Why use this converter

It is faster and more private than most: there is no upload, no account, and no rate limit, the output updates live, and you can copy or export a Markdown file in a single click. It also keeps the document structure intact, so you spend your time editing prose instead of repairing broken lists and tables.

It is also part of a small, focused developer toolkit. If you need the reverse direction, Markdown to HTML renders Markdown back into HTML. To tidy messy markup before converting, the HTML Formatter indents and pretty-prints it. And to compare two versions of the converted text, the Text Diff Checker highlights every change.

Frequently asked questions