HTML to Markdown

Paste HTML on the left and Markdown appears on the right. Swap the boxes to go back the other way.

Script and style elements are dropped rather than converted, because their contents are code that would otherwise land in your document as text. Markdown's own markers are escaped in the output, so an asterisk in the HTML comes out as \* and does not turn into emphasis on the way back.

HTML can say more than Markdown can. A span with a class, a nested table, a definition list, an inline style, an id used as an anchor target: none of these has a Markdown spelling, so the converter keeps the text and drops the wrapper.

Whitespace goes too. HTML collapses runs of spaces when it renders, so this does the same, and a document that relied on preformatted spacing outside a pre element will not come back the same.

That is the trade the format was designed around. Gruber's stated goal was that the source should read as plain text, and anything that cannot be written plainly is not in the language.

Markdown came out of a collaboration between John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004. Swartz, then 17, worked on the syntax with Gruber and wrote html2text, a Python script that did exactly what this page does.

His reasoning was practical. He wanted to take a page off the web, edit it as text and put it back, and there was no way to get out of HTML once you were in it. html2text is still maintained and still used inside larger tools.

Swartz also wrote atx, the heading format Markdown borrowed, and worked on RSS 1.0 and the early Creative Commons licences. He died in 2013, aged 26, while facing federal charges over bulk-downloading academic papers from JSTOR.

Markdown to HTML is the forward direction, and it explains why the two formats disagree about so much. XML to JSON uses the same tag parser underneath, pointed at data rather than at prose.

Text rescued from a web page often needs line breaks removed before it reads properly.