How to Convert Markdown to TXT Without Losing Important Content
The naive way to strip Markdown formatting is a basic find-and-replace: delete every #, every *, every [ and ]. It mostly works, but it also breaks a few things people don't expect.
Where a naive strip goes wrong
Delete every bracket and parenthesis character and a link like [Contact us](mailto:hello@example.com) turns into Contact us hello@example.com — readable, but with the relationship between the link text and the destination now unclear. A careful conversion keeps that context: Contact us (mailto:hello@example.com), preserving both pieces of information instead of jamming them together.
What a proper conversion should preserve
- Links and images — text and URL both survive, just in a plain-text-friendly format.
- Lists — items stay separated with a plain dash, so the structure is still visually obvious.
- Code blocks — the code itself stays, just without the triple-backtick fence around it.
- Blockquotes — the quoted text remains, without the leading
>character.
What genuinely can't survive the switch
Tables lose their visual grid, since plain text has no native way to draw column borders — the pipe characters either stay (looking a little odd) or get stripped (losing the column structure entirely). If a document leans heavily on tables, plain text is probably the wrong export format regardless of how careful the conversion is; consider HTML or PDF instead, both of which render tables properly.
Try it
The Markdown to TXT tool on this site handles links, lists, blockquotes, and code blocks the careful way described above — upload a file or paste text to see exactly what survives.
Frequently asked questions
- Will bold and italic text just disappear?
- The asterisks disappear, but the words themselves stay exactly as written — you lose the visual emphasis, not the content.