From your description I suspect that your file falls under the realm of e-discovery review. A chat interaction has taken place between two or more parties and incriminating evidence is available in this chat history. Based on this my assumptions are italic You cannot alter the original chat log file content due to the chain of custody (so no HTML stripping) Their might be some other related files that you might want to search simultaneously The easiest option would be to upload the file into GoldFynch (). This is a cloud based e-discovery review platform from mypany. You get one case for free which is 1 GB so you could easily load it to GoldFynch and find your results then produce the file for the other party. If my assumptions are wrong and you just want to view the file you could do the following Convert from HTML to PDF. There are a ton of converters online some are cloud based. But remember with the online converters there are usually two problems. The confidentiality might be an issue because the service might be storing the file. 1 You could also strip the HTML- there are many open sourced tools for this purpose. I have had good luck with Beautiful Soup (Python based )- If you are a programmer you could mess around with the various functions and get the results you need. This gives an example of what Beautiful Soup can do Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup ~zlotnick Try opening the file in a editor like NotePad++ Notepad++ Home s Regardless of which system you choose you will need to have the following at a minimum Relatively newputer. All the options suggested above will take a while to load process etc. So yourputer resources might be fully utilized Patience - any solution that is going to work is also going to take some time to process due to the file size. ordered-list