How to Remove Markdown Formatting from Text

Strip markdown syntax like bold, italic, headers, and links to get clean plain text.

Markdown is everywhere — Notion, Obsidian, GitHub, Bear, and countless other tools export text with markdown formatting. When you need the plain text content without the syntax, this tool strips it clean.

What Gets Removed

The Remove Markdown Formatting tool strips bold markers (** and __), italic markers (* and _), heading prefixes (# through ######), link syntax [text](url) keeping just the text, inline code backticks, code blocks (triple backticks), and blockquote markers (>).

Common Use Cases

Migrating notes from markdown apps to plain text systems. Extracting readable content from GitHub READMEs. Cleaning up markdown before pasting into email, Slack, or other non-markdown platforms. Preparing text for data analysis where formatting is noise.

How It Works

Paste your markdown text into the tool and click Run. The tool processes formatting markers in order, starting with code blocks (so formatted code inside blocks doesn't get double-processed), then inline formatting, then structural elements like headers and blockquotes.

What It Keeps

Bullet points (- and *) are kept as list markers since they're meaningful structure. Line breaks and paragraph spacing are preserved. The content of links is kept even though the URL is removed — you get the link text without the markdown link syntax.

Pipeline Use

For a full content extraction workflow: Remove Markdown Formatting → Normalize Whitespace → Remove Empty Lines. This gives you clean, compact plain text from any markdown source.

Try it now — paste your text below

Everything runs locally in your browser. No data is stored.

Remove Markdown Formatting

Remove markdown formatting including bold, italic, headers, links, code blocks, and blockquotes, leaving clean readable text.

Example

Input

# Title
**Bold** and *italic* text
[Link](https://example.com)

Output

Title
Bold and italic text
Link

How Remove Markdown Formatting Works

Remove markdown formatting including bold, italic, headers, links, code blocks, and blockquotes, leaving clean readable text.

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data is sent to any server. Paste your text, click Run, and get your result instantly. You can also chain this tool with others using the pipeline feature: run Remove Markdown Formatting, then continue with a related tool to build a multi-step text workflow.

Related Tools

Remove HTML Tags

Strip all HTML tags and keep only the text content.

Remove Special Characters

Strip non-standard characters, keeping letters, numbers, and basic punctuation.

Normalize Whitespace

Fix irregular spacing, tabs, and non-breaking spaces.

TextRefinery is a free, open-source text processing toolkit. Learn more about regular expressions and text processing on the web.