HTML to Markdown

Markdown is a plain-text formatting syntax (popularized by John Gruber in 2004) that maps a small set of symbols to HTML: # for headings, ** for bold, * for italic, - for list items, and [text](url) for links. This tool runs the reverse mapping, but it does so with a handful of regular expressions rather than a real DOM parser. It rewrites <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags into #, ##, and ### prefixes, converts <strong> to **, <em> to *, turns each <li> into a leading dash, unwraps <p> tags into blank-line-separated blocks, and matches anchors of the exact form <a href="...">text</a>. Any remaining tags are simply stripped. Because it is regex-driven, it has real blind spots: it does not produce Markdown for images, tables, code blocks, blockquotes, h4 through h6, or ordered lists, and it cannot handle nested lists or attributes in an unexpected order. Links only convert when the href uses double quotes and the link text contains no inner tags. Treat the output as a fast first draft, then clean up by hand or move to a parser-based library like Turndown for production migrations.