HTML to Markdown

The HTML to Markdown Converter takes HTML - a page you copied from a CMS, the output of a rich-text editor, a chunk of a rendered article - and turns it back into clean Markdown. Headings become # lines, <strong> and <em> become bold and italics, anchors become [text](url) links, <img> becomes image syntax, ordered and unordered lists become numbered and bulleted lists, <blockquote> becomes > quotes, <pre><code> becomes fenced code blocks, and tables become GitHub Flavored Markdown pipe tables.

Converting HTML to Markdown by hand is slowest with tables, which is where an HTML to Markdown converter saves the most time. Paste <table><tr><th>Plan</th><th>Price</th></tr><tr><td>Free</td><td>$0</td></tr></table> and you get three lines back: | Plan | Price |, then the | --- | --- | divider, then | Free | $0 |. The same HTML table to Markdown step works for a pricing grid copied from a docs page or a spec table exported from a wiki, and you can check the result by pasting it into any GitHub comment preview.

Markdown is the portable format that documentation sites, static blogs, README files, note apps and AI prompts all understand. HTML is what you usually end up with when you copy from the web or export from a WYSIWYG editor, and it carries a lot of markup you do not want in a plain-text document. Converting one to the other by hand is tedious and error-prone; a rule-based converter does it consistently.

Everything runs in your browser. The parser is hand-written and dependency-free - it does not use a remote API and it does not even rely on the browser's DOM, so it is tolerant of the unclosed tags and stray attributes that real-world HTML is full of. Your drafts, internal pages and pasted content never leave the page. Paste HTML, choose your bullet style, then copy the Markdown or download an .md file.

The conversion is lossy in one direction by design, because Markdown expresses far less than HTML does. Classes, ids, inline styles, spans, data attributes and anything positional are dropped, since Markdown has no way to carry them: what survives is the structure, which is usually the point of converting. GitHub Flavored Markdown handles tables, but only simple ones, so a table with merged cells or block content inside a cell cannot be represented and comes across flattened. Nested lists convert cleanly; deeply nested combinations of lists and blockquotes are where output gets fragile. Messy CMS markup with unclosed tags is parsed rather than rejected, so pasting from a rich text editor generally works, and it is worth reading the result rather than trusting it.