Clean up text · markupRemove asterisks and hashes from an AI answer

**text**

Double and single asterisks around words mean bold and italics. We remove them and the text stays.

## Summary

Hashes at the start of a line are headings of different levels. We drop the hashes; the heading stays on its own line.

- item

Hyphens and asterisks at the start of lines are list items. Keep them as dashes or remove them — your choice.

`npm i`

The backticks around code go; the code itself stays exactly as it was.

\$100

Before a dollar sign or tilde the model sometimes puts a backslash. We remove it.

text (url)

A Markdown link becomes the link text with the address in brackets.

Paste the answer into the box — the markup is stripped at once, and the text and paragraphs stay. Asterisks around words meant bold or italics, hashes at the start of a line meant headings, hyphens meant list items. Clean text with highlighted edits appears on the right; copy it with the button or download it as a file. Asterisks in expressions like 2*3*4 are left alone.

The model writes its answer in Markdown, and the chat window turns that into bold text, headings and lists. When the text is copied as plain text or pasted where Markdown is not understood — Word, an email, a messenger or a web form — the formatting disappears but the markup characters stay: asterisks, hashes, backticks and backslashes.

Choose “Lists with dashes”: items stay on separate lines, bulleted ones with a dash and numbered ones with their numbers. In “Plain text” mode the markers are removed entirely and items become ordinary lines. Paragraphs and the blank lines between them are kept in both modes, and tables turn into lines with cells separated by tabs.

Clean the text here and copy the result: Word receives plain text with paragraphs, without asterisks or hashes. Headings stay on lines of their own — apply a heading style to them in Word itself. Links become the link text followed by the address in brackets, so the address is not lost even if the document is printed later.

Turn on “Remove escaping”: the backslashes before $, ~, *, _ and # disappear. The model adds them so the chat does not take a dollar sign for the start of a formula or an asterisk for bold. In the chat the backslash is invisible, but it stays in the text when you copy it. The character after it is treated as plain text, not markup.

Yes, the site has a separate Markdown → HTML tool: it shows a live preview, gives clean code and builds a ready file with styles. Here markup is only stripped to get plain text. If an AI answer is going to be published on a website with headings and lists, it is easier to convert it to HTML straight away than to clean it.