Markdown lets you write formatted text with plain characters — # for a heading, - for a bullet, **bold** for emphasis. HTML is the tagged markup browsers actually render. Converting Markdown to HTML turns your shorthand into <h1>, <ul> and <strong>; going the other way turns messy HTML back into clean Markdown.
What Markdown becomes
| Markdown | HTML |
|---|---|
# Title | <h1>Title</h1> |
- item | <ul><li>item</li></ul> |
**bold** | <strong>bold</strong> |
[text](url) | <a href="url">text</a> |
```code``` | <pre><code>code</code></pre> |
A converter walks your Markdown and emits the matching tags. Most tools follow GitHub-Flavored Markdown, which adds tables, task lists and fenced code blocks on top of the original spec.
Markdown to HTML
This is the common direction: you wrote a README or a blog post in Markdown and need HTML to paste into a page, an email or a CMS. Paste the Markdown, convert, and copy the HTML. A preview helps you confirm the formatting looks right before you use it.
HTML to Markdown
The reverse is handy for cleaning up. Copy a section from a web page and it arrives as a tangle of <div>s and inline styles; converting to Markdown strips it down to the words and structure you actually want for notes or documentation. Note that HTML-only details — inline CSS, complex nested tables — can’t always be expressed in Markdown, so they get simplified.
Common Markdown pitfalls
A few habits cause most “why didn’t it render?” moments:
- Lists need a blank line before them. Glue a list directly under a paragraph and many parsers treat it as one paragraph. Leave an empty line first.
- A single line break is usually ignored. Markdown collapses one newline into a space. For a hard break, end the line with two spaces or leave a blank line to start a new paragraph.
- Underscores inside words can trigger italics. In some flavors
snake_case_nameitalicizes the middle chunk. Wrap it in backticks or escape the underscores:snake\_case\_name. - Indenting four spaces makes a code block. Accidental indentation silently turns text into
<pre>output.
Frequently asked questions
Is Markdown standardized? The closest thing to a standard is CommonMark, with GitHub-Flavored Markdown adding tables, task lists and strikethrough on top. Flavors differ, so a footnote that works on one site may not on another.
Can I put HTML inside Markdown? Yes — most renderers pass raw HTML straight through, which is handy for the odd <sub> or <details> block that Markdown can’t express. Sanitizing renderers may strip it out.
Does the output include <html> and <body>? No. Converters emit an HTML fragment — just the <h1>, <p> and so on. Wrap it in a full document yourself if you need a standalone page. For a different markup language with far stricter rules, see our guide to XML.
Do it privately, in your browser
The Markdown ⇄ HTML converter runs entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded — and shows a sandboxed live preview that renders the layout without executing any scripts. Convert either direction, preview, then copy or download.
Related tools
- Keeping an eye on length while you write? Use the word counter.
- Pasted text full of stray line breaks? Tidy it with the text cleaner.