# Website to plain text

> Enter the address of a public page and get its main text as plain text: no HTML, no Markdown marks, no menus or cookie banners. Copy it or download it as a .txt file.

Canonical page: https://clawifi.dev/tools/website-to-text

Run it on the page: enter a public URL and its main text comes back as plain text, with Copy and Download buttons. No key needed: https://clawifi.dev/tools/website-to-text

## What it does

- Reads the page through Clawifi (a plain fetch first, a real browser only when the page needs one) and keeps the main text, leaving out navigation, banners and footers.
- Removes the formatting: headings, bold and italics lose their marks, links and images keep their words but not their addresses, and table rows become tab-separated lines.
- Shows the word count and the text in a panel you can copy or download as a `.txt` file.

## Limits

- The free preview stops at 20,000 characters of the page’s text; longer pages are cut, and the result says so.
- Link addresses are dropped on purpose. To keep them, use [URL to Markdown](https://clawifi.dev/tools/url-to-markdown) or the [link extractor](https://clawifi.dev/tools/extract-links).
- Public pages only, one page per run, and 12 runs a minute per address shared with the other free tools.

## Do this from your agent

An agent can ask `scrape_url` for the `text` format with an API key. Without a key, the hosted MCP server’s `scrape_url` returns Markdown as a trial (12 a minute and 50 a day per address).

**MCP**

```text
scrape_url(url="https://example.com", formats=["text"])
```

**cURL**

```sh
curl https://api.clawifi.dev/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWIFI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["text"]}'
```

**Python**

```python
from clawifi import Clawifi

client = Clawifi()  # reads CLAWIFI_API_KEY
page = client.scrape("https://example.com", formats=["text"])
print(page["formats"]["text"])
```

Read more: [Fetch and scrape](https://clawifi.dev/docs/fetch) · [POST /scrape](https://clawifi.dev/docs/api/post-scrape) · [Remote MCP](https://clawifi.dev/docs/remote-mcp) · [Docs](https://clawifi.dev/docs) · [Pricing](https://clawifi.dev/pricing)

## Questions

### How do I convert a website to plain text?

Paste the page’s URL above and press Get text. Clawifi reads the page, keeps the main text and removes the markup, and you can copy the text or download it as a .txt file.

### What is the difference between plain text and Markdown?

Markdown keeps structure as marks: `#` for headings, brackets around link labels with the address after them, `|` for tables. Plain text keeps the words only. Markdown suits an LLM prompt; plain text suits word counts, diffs, search indexes and reading aloud.

### Does it work on pages that need JavaScript?

Often, yes. Clawifi tries a plain fetch first and renders the page in a browser only when the text is not in the HTML. Pages behind a login or a bot challenge will not come through.

### Is there a limit?

The free tool allows 12 runs a minute per address and cuts long pages at 20,000 characters. A [free API key](https://clawifi.dev/signup) includes 1,000 credits a month; see [Pricing](https://clawifi.dev/pricing).

## Other free tools

- [URL to Markdown](https://clawifi.dev/tools/url-to-markdown): A public page as clean Markdown, ready for a prompt.
- [robots.txt and llms.txt checker](https://clawifi.dev/tools/llms-txt-checker): Which AI bots a site allows, and an llms.txt structure check.
- [Agent-readability test](https://clawifi.dev/tools/agent-readability-test): Can an agent read this page? Checks, each explained.
- [Sitemap to JSON](https://clawifi.dev/tools/sitemap-to-json): A sitemap.xml as JSON: URLs and lastmod, downloadable.
- [Link extractor](https://clawifi.dev/tools/extract-links): Every link on a page as full URLs, same-site or external, as CSV.
- [Find the answer on a page](https://clawifi.dev/tools/find-answer-on-page): Ask a question of a long page, get only the passages that answer it.
- [Page date checker](https://clawifi.dev/tools/page-date-checker): Published and updated dates of a page, and where they came from.
- [All free tools](https://clawifi.dev/free-tools): The estimator, the request builder and every tool.