HTML to Markdown Converter — Clean, Copy-Ready

What this tool does

It rewrites HTML as Markdown. When you copy a section of a web page, or export from a CMS, you get HTML with its tags and styling; when you want to put that content into a README, a docs site, a wiki or a Markdown editor, you need the same text in Markdown. This tool does that reduction, keeping the headings, lists, links and emphasis and throwing away the parts Markdown cannot express.

What converts, and what is dropped

HTML	Markdown
<h1>…</h1>	# …
<strong> / <em>	**bold** / _italic_
<a href> / <img>	[text](url) / 
<ul><li>	- item
<pre><code>	fenced ``` block
colours, classes, styles	dropped — Markdown has no equivalent

Why reduce HTML at all

HTML carries presentation as well as meaning: spans with classes, divs for layout, inline styles. Markdown keeps only the meaning — this is a heading, this is a list, this is a link — which is why it is portable across systems and clean to diff in version control. Converting HTML to Markdown is really a funnel from the messy, styled web down to the structural essence, and that is exactly what makes it paste cleanly into a tool that uses a different stylesheet.

What it cannot recover

The conversion is a reduction, and some structure simply has no Markdown equivalent. Knowing which parts are lossy tells you what to check in the output rather than discovering it later:

• Nested lists are flattened. An inner <ul> inside an <li> comes out as plain text appended to the parent item, because the conversion works by matching tag pairs rather than walking a tree. Two-level menus and outlines need their indentation restored by hand.
• Ordered lists keep their numbers, with one caveat. <ol>, start and reversed all convert to numbered Markdown. CommonMark renumbers from the first item's number, so a list that starts at 3 renders as 3, 4, 5 in most parsers but as 1, 2, 3 in a strict one — the numbers are written out correctly either way.
• Tables lose their alignment and multi-line cells. The first row becomes the header whether it held <th> or <td>, every column is left aligned, and rowspan/colspan are dropped — the cells that were merged simply do not exist in the output.
• Definition lists, figures, captions and details are reduced to text. The words survive; the semantics that told a reader these words were a caption or a collapsible section do not.
• Inline HTML is not preserved verbatim. A <span style>, a <sup> or a custom element is stripped to its text. If you need raw HTML passed through, this is the wrong converter.

Why the output looks different from the page

Two conversions happen at once. The first is structural — tags become Markdown syntax. The second is textual: HTML entities are decoded (& becomes &,   becomes a space) so the Markdown contains the character, not its escape. That is what you want in almost every case, but it does mean an entity that was deliberately written to be escaped becomes a bare character.

Whitespace is normalised at the end: trailing spaces on a line are removed and runs of three or more newlines collapse to one blank line. Markdown treats those as cosmetic, but a hard line break in Markdown needs two trailing spaces, so any <br> that became a plain newline will render as a space in most parsers rather than a break. Where the break mattered, add the two spaces or a backslash at the end of the line.

Getting a better result

The single biggest improvement is to paste less. A whole page's HTML includes navigation, footers and cookie banners, all of which convert to text you then delete. Selecting just the article body in the browser's inspector, or copying the rendered article rather than the page source, gives the converter only the content you actually want.

The second is to paste clean HTML. Content exported from a CMS is often a nest of wrapper <div>s around single paragraphs; the converter keeps the text and discards the nesting, so the result is usually fine, but it cannot tell a layout wrapper from a meaningful section. If the output has stray sentences in the wrong place, the cause is almost always a wrapper that was not closed where you expected.

Privacy

Pasting HTML into a converter often means pasting an unpublished article, an internal email or a client's copy. This page never uploads it: the parsing and rewriting happen in your browser and nothing is sent to a server.

Frequently asked questions

Go deeper

Longer explanations of the problems this tool solves:

Markdown conversion: HTML, tables and what is lossy

Sources

• CommonMark Spec — the Markdown syntax this targets.