Markdown formatting remover
Paste an answer full of asterisks, hashes and pipes and get the words back on their own. Headings lose their hashes, emphasis loses its asterisks, links keep their text, tables become columns and code blocks keep every character inside them.
Why a chatbot answer arrives full of asterisks
Every major assistant writes in Markdown, because the window you read it in renders Markdown. The asterisks, hashes and pipes never appear on screen, so it is easy to forget they are in the text at all — until you copy it somewhere that does not render them. Email clients, CMS fields, ticket systems, spreadsheet cells and SMS all show the syntax raw.
Anything reaching you through an API has the same shape with none of the disguise: the response is a string of Markdown, and if you pipe it into a page or a notification it arrives with every marker showing. Exports from Notion, Obsidian, Bear and most static-site tools are Markdown files for the same reason.
What you usually want out the other side is not a different format but no format: the sentences, in order, with the structure that survives in plain text — line breaks, indentation, list numbering — and nothing that was only ever an instruction to a renderer.
What happens to each piece of syntax
Headings lose their hashes and keep their words, including the closing hashes some writers add. Bold, italic, bold-italic and strikethrough markers are removed and the words inside them stay. Inline code keeps its contents and loses its backticks; a fenced block keeps every line inside it exactly as written, including any asterisks and underscores, which are code rather than formatting.
A link keeps its label and drops the URL, unless you tick the box to keep it, in which case the address follows the text in brackets. An image becomes its alt text. Reference-style links keep their label and the definition lines at the bottom of the document are dropped. Bare autolinks in angle brackets become the plain address.
Bullets are removed and the indentation of nested items is kept, so the shape of a list survives. Numbers are kept: a bullet is punctuation the renderer would have drawn for you, while the 3. in a numbered list is content the reader needs. Blockquote arrows go, table rows become tab-separated columns with the divider row dropped, and horizontal rules disappear.
The three things a naive strip gets wrong
The first is the underscore. Deleting every _ turns user_first_name into userfirstname and quietly corrupts identifiers, file names and URLs. Markdown itself does not treat an underscore inside a word as emphasis, and neither does this: an underscore only counts as a marker at a word boundary.
The second is arithmetic. 2 * 3 * 4 looks exactly like emphasis to a pattern that only knows about asterisks, and the text comes back as 2 3 4. An asterisk followed by a space is not a marker, which is the same rule the renderers use.
The third is nesting. **bold with *italic* inside** needs two passes, because the inner pair is only reachable once the outer one has gone — a single pass over the line leaves stray asterisks in the middle of the sentence. Emphasis is applied repeatedly here until nothing more changes, and code spans are lifted out first so that a * inside one is never treated as a marker at all.
Worked example
Before
## Quarterly summary Revenue was **up 12%**, driven by *three* regions. - Retained `enterprise_plan` accounts - Closed the [Q3 review](https://example.com/q3 "Internal") early 1. Ship the fix 2. Tell support > Margins held.
After
Quarterly summary Revenue was up 12%, driven by three regions. Retained enterprise_plan accounts Closed the Q3 review early 1. Ship the fix 2. Tell support Margins held.
Common questions
How do I remove Markdown formatting from text?
Paste the Markdown and click Strip the Markdown. Headings, emphasis, links, lists, blockquotes, tables and code fences are reduced to the plain text they were wrapping.
Does it delete the contents of code blocks?
No. A fenced block keeps every line inside it exactly as written and only the fence lines themselves are removed, because the asterisks and underscores in code are part of the code.
Why are the numbers in my numbered list still there?
Because they carry meaning that a bullet does not. A dash in front of an item is punctuation a renderer would have drawn; the number in a numbered list tells the reader which step they are on, so it stays.
Can I keep the link addresses?
Tick "Keep link addresses" and each link comes back as its text followed by the URL in brackets. Left unticked, the address is dropped and only the words remain.
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