HTML to Markdown Converter

How to Use the HTML to Markdown Converter

Paste your HTML source code into the input area. The converter parses it in real time using the browser's built-in DOM parser and walks through each element, translating it to the equivalent Markdown syntax. The result appears in the output area as you type. Click "Copy Markdown" to grab the result for use in your project.

The converter handles all the elements that have direct Markdown equivalents: headings become hash-prefixed lines, bold and italic text get wrapped in asterisks, links become bracket-and-parenthesis pairs, lists convert to dashes or numbers, code blocks become fenced with backticks, and tables translate to the pipe-and-dash format. Elements without a Markdown equivalent have their text content extracted and preserved.

When to Convert HTML to Markdown

The most common reason to reverse HTML into Markdown is content migration. When you move blog posts from WordPress, Ghost, or another CMS to a Markdown-based system like Jekyll, Hugo, Astro, or a Git-based wiki, the existing content arrives as HTML. Manually rewriting hundreds of pages is impractical. A converter does the mechanical work, leaving you to clean up edge cases and verify the output.

Another frequent use case is documentation. If you receive API documentation, technical specs, or style guides as HTML files, converting them to Markdown makes the content editable in any text editor, versionable in Git, and portable between documentation platforms. Markdown files are plain text, which means they can be diffed, searched, and reviewed in pull requests just like source code.

What Gets Lost in Translation

Markdown is intentionally simple. It does not support CSS classes, inline styles, custom attributes, colors, font sizes, or layout structures like grids and flexbox. When you convert HTML to Markdown, these visual details are discarded because the format has no way to represent them. What remains is the structural content: headings, paragraphs, emphasis, links, images, lists, and code. For most written content, that structural skeleton is exactly what you want to preserve.

Handling Tables

HTML tables with thead and tbody sections convert cleanly to the pipe-delimited Markdown table format, complete with a separator row of dashes below the header. Tables that rely on colspan, rowspan, or nested tables do not have Markdown equivalents. The converter extracts the text from each cell in reading order, producing a flat table that captures the data even if the complex structure is lost.

Cleaning Up After Conversion

Automated conversion gets you about ninety percent of the way. The remaining ten percent usually involves removing leftover div wrappers that produced empty lines, fixing whitespace around inline formatting, merging split paragraphs, and adding blank lines between sections where the source HTML used margins instead of structural elements. A quick pass through the output catches these artifacts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What HTML elements does this converter handle?

Headings (h1-h6), paragraphs, bold, italic, strikethrough, links, images, ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, code blocks, horizontal rules, and tables. Unknown elements have their text content extracted.

What happens to styles and attributes?

Attributes like class, id, and style are dropped. Markdown has no styling system. Only href on links, src and alt on images, and language classes on code elements are preserved.

Can I convert an entire web page?

You can paste any HTML. For best results, paste the content area rather than the full source with navigation, scripts, and metadata. The converter extracts text from all elements but produces cleaner output from content-focused markup.

Is data sent to a server?

No. The DOMParser API in your browser parses the HTML locally. No network requests are made.

How are nested elements handled?

The converter recurses through the DOM tree. Bold inside a heading, links inside lists, and images inside paragraphs all produce correctly nested Markdown output.