URL to text: 3 ways to turn a webpage into clean text or Markdown

Exa’s guide explains how to convert webpages into clean plain text or Markdown by removing ads, navigation, and other nonessential elements for reuse in documents, notes, and AI applications. It compares online converters such as URLtoText and Firecrawl for one-off pages, the MarkDownload browser extension for content visible in a logged-in browser session, and code or APIs for scalable, scheduled processing. Plain text is recommended for simple reading or word counts, while Markdown preserves headings, lists, tables, and links, making it more useful for language models. For static pages, the guide demonstrates using Python’s requests and BeautifulSoup libraries to download, clean, and extract content, while noting that JavaScript-heavy pages require browser rendering or services such as the Exa Contents API. Exa’s API supports JavaScript-rendered pages, PDFs, live fetching, and query-based highlights, which can reduce the amount of content sent to models, while the guide also notes that images are generally omitted or retained only as Markdown links.

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