HTML to Markdown converter

When you copy from a browser, Google Docs or Word, the clipboard holds two versions: plain text and HTML (text/html). The paste area reads the HTML version, so you do not need to open the page source first. The HTML it received appears in the box below it, where you can edit it and watch the Markdown update.

Office apps add a lot of markup. On Windows the copied HTML is wrapped in <!--StartFragment--> comments, which the tool strips. Word adds many styled spans; Google Docs puts the whole paste inside <b style="font-weight:normal" id="docs-internal-guid-…">. A plain converter turns all of that text bold. This one unwraps that tag and turns spans with font-weight: 700 or font-style: italic into **bold** and _italic_.

If only plain text is on the clipboard, for example after copying from a terminal, there is no formatting to keep, and the tool says so.

JavaScript with turndown, the library this tool uses. Tables and strikethrough come from the turndown-plugin-gfm plugin:

import TurndownService from 'turndown';
import { gfm } from 'turndown-plugin-gfm';

const td = new TurndownService({ headingStyle: 'atx', codeBlockStyle: 'fenced', bulletListMarker: '-' });
td.use(gfm);
td.remove(['script', 'style']);
const markdown = td.turndown(html);

turndown’s defaults are setext headings, * bullets and indented code blocks, so set the options above if you want the style most READMEs use.

Python with markdownify. Its default heading style is also setext (UNDERLINED):

from markdownify import markdownify as md

markdown = md(html, heading_style="ATX", strip=["script", "style"])

Command line with pandoc:

pandoc -f html -t gfm page.html -o page.md
# Without the line wrapping pandoc adds by default:
pandoc -f html -t gfm --wrap=none page.html -o page.md

Go with html-to-markdown v2. Tables need its table plugin (--plugin-table on the CLI):

import htmltomarkdown "github.com/JohannesKaufmann/html-to-markdown/v2"

markdown, err := htmltomarkdown.ConvertString(html)
if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) }

• Layout and styling. Colors, fonts, columns and classes have no Markdown form. If a block must keep them, leave it as raw HTML in the Markdown file; GFM renders most HTML tags.
• Merged table cells. Markdown tables have no colspan or rowspan. The converter keeps the columns lined up by adding empty cells, but the merge itself is gone. Keep complex tables as HTML.
• Relative links and images. A link like /pricing stays relative. If the Markdown will live somewhere else, replace it with the full URL.
• Characters that mean something in Markdown. Text such as *not emphasis* or a line starting with 1. is escaped with backslashes so it stays text. So is text that looks like a tag, such as <div> written in a sentence; unescaped, a Markdown renderer would read it as raw HTML and hide it.

To check the result, switch the output to Preview, or open it in the Markdown to HTML converter. To tidy the HTML before converting, use the HTML formatter. To build or fix a table, use the Markdown table generator. Moving content between systems? Browse CMS tools and documentation tools on DevHunt.