Convert XHTML & EPUB Chapters to Markdown

How to convert XHTML to Markdown

1. Provide the document: drop an .xhtml or .html file onto the dropzone, or paste the markup into the editor. For an EPUB, rename it to .zip, unzip it, and use the chapter files inside.
2. Local processing: the markup is parsed, sanitised with DOMPurify and converted by Turndown in a Web Worker — no upload and no asset fetching.
3. Copy or download: copy the Markdown or save it as a .md file for your docs-as-code pipeline, Hugo/Jekyll content directory or vault.

Why Convert XHTML to Markdown with MD Convert?

• Lenient parsing where a strict XML parser fails

  Real XHTML routinely breaks the rules it declares: an unescaped &, an unclosed <p>, a stray attribute. A conforming XML parser must reject the whole document for any one of them. Parsing through the browser's HTML parser recovers the document instead, which is what you want for a file you did not write a decade ago. Self-closing <br />, <img /> and <hr /> are handled natively.

• Presentational debt removed, not translated

  style attributes and <style> elements are stripped, along with <form>, <input> and <button>, and <font>, <center> and bare <span class> wrappers leave no trace — there is no Markdown construct for them. That removal is the point of the conversion rather than a loss of fidelity.

• Structural semantics mapped precisely

  Headings become ATX (# … ######), <strong> and <b> become **bold**, <em> and <i> become _italic_, lists keep their nesting, <pre> becomes a fenced block rather than an indented one, and tables become GFM pipe tables whose first row is treated as the header — a pipe table without a delimiter row is not a table at all in GFM.

• Sanitisation as a security control

  Inherited markup is treated as hostile input: <script> elements, on* event-handler attributes and javascript: URLs are removed before conversion, so nothing executable reaches the preview pane or survives into the Markdown you paste elsewhere. That matters most for exactly these files — old pages of unknown provenance.

Understanding the XHTML Format: XHTML 1.1 (W3C Recommendation)

Format

Extensible HyperText Markup Language

Specification

XHTML 1.1 (W3C Recommendation)

Media type

application/xhtml+xml

Parser used

Turndown + DOMPurify

# Convert an entire EPUB archive directly to GFM with media extraction
pandoc -f epub -t gfm book.epub -o book.md --extract-media=./media

# Or convert a single unzipped XHTML chapter
pandoc -f html -t gfm chapter01.xhtml -o chapter01.md

# Programmatic XHTML conversion with lenient error recovery
# requires: pip install beautifulsoup4 markdownify
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from markdownify import markdownify as md

with open("chapter.xhtml", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    # html.parser recovers malformed legacy XML without throwing fatal XML errors
    soup = BeautifulSoup(f.read(), "html.parser")

markdown_text = md(str(soup), heading_style="ATX")
print(markdown_text)