PowerShell: Convert HTML to Plain Text (Tested in 7 and 5.1)

To convert HTML to plain text in PowerShell, strip the tags with -replace and then decode entities like & with WebUtility.HtmlDecode. For a short snippet, this one line does both:

[System.Net.WebUtility]::HtmlDecode(($html -replace '<[^>]+>', ''))

Full pages and email bodies need a bit more care, though. Scripts, styles and line breaks get in the way, and Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7 don’t agree on a few of the tools. I ran everything below in both.

Strip HTML tags with -replace

The pattern <[^>]+> matches a less-than sign, everything that isn’t a greater-than sign, and the closing bracket. In other words, one tag. Replace each match with nothing:

$html = '<p>The <b>Q4 budget</b> review is on Oct&nbsp;14 &amp; starts at 9:00 AM ET.</p>'
$html -replace '<[^>]+>', ''

$cells = '<td>Austin</td><td>Denver</td>'
$cells -replace '<[^>]+>', ''
($cells -replace '<[^>]+>', ' ' -replace '\s+', ' ').Trim()

Output:

The Q4 budget review is on Oct 14 & starts at 9:00 AM ET.
AustinDenver
Austin Denver

The tags are gone, but &nbsp; and &amp; are still there. And the table cells ran together as AustinDenver, so replace tags with a space when they separate words, then collapse the spaces.

-replace swaps every match, not just the first. The pattern syntax is covered in my PowerShell regex guide.

Decode HTML entities like &amp; and &nbsp;

WebUtility.HtmlDecode turns entities back into characters. It’s part of System.Net, so it works in PowerShell 7 and 5.1 with no setup:

$text  = 'Oct 14 & 15, 2026 <draft> "Denver" $1,250'
$plain = [System.Net.WebUtility]::HtmlDecode($text)
$plain
'No-break spaces: {0}' -f [regex]::Matches($plain, '\u00A0').Count

$plain = $plain -replace '\u00A0', ' '
'After the fix:   {0}' -f [regex]::Matches($plain, '\u00A0').Count

Output:

Oct 14 & 15, 2026 <draft> "Denver" $1,250
No-break spaces: 1
After the fix:   0

Watch the &nbsp;. It becomes U+00A0, a no-break space that looks like a space but fails a match on ‘ ‘. Swap it for a regular space, the same way you’d replace any text in a string.

Many scripts use System.Web.HttpUtility instead. That type isn’t loaded in Windows PowerShell 5.1:

try {
    [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlDecode('Tom & Maria')
} catch {
    "Failed. $($_.Exception.Message)"
}

Output:

Tom & Maria

That’s PowerShell 7. Windows PowerShell 5.1 prints Failed. Unable to find type [System.Web.HttpUtility].

In 5.1, run Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Web first, or just use WebUtility. The try and catch blocks keep the error readable.

Remove script and style blocks first

My sample file, update.html, is a small office notice with a style block in the head and a script at the bottom. A plain tag strip keeps the code inside them:

$html  = Get-Content -Path 'C:\psfaqs\htmltext\update.html' -Raw
$naive = $html -replace '<[^>]+>', ''
$clean = $html -replace '(?is)<(script|style)\b[^>]*>.*?</\1>', '' -replace '<[^>]+>', ''

'Naive text has CSS:        {0}' -f ($naive -match 'color:')
'Naive text has JavaScript: {0}' -f ($naive -match 'console\.log')
'Clean text has either:     {0}' -f ($clean -match 'color:|console\.log')

Output:

Naive text has CSS:        True
Naive text has JavaScript: True
Clean text has either:     False

The (?is) prefix makes the match case-insensitive and lets the dot cross line breaks, so .*? spans the whole block. The \1 makes the closing tag match the opening one, much l