Convert Sanity rich text to plain text string

Great to hear you're loving Sanity! Yes, you can absolutely convert Portable Text to plain text strings, similar to Prismic's $prismic.asText(). There are several ways to do this:

1. Using pt::text() in GROQ queries (Recommended)

The most efficient approach is using the built-in pt::text() GROQ function directly in your queries:

*[_type == "post"] {
  title,
  "description": pt::text(body)
}

This converts your Portable Text field to plain text at query time, which is perfect for generating excerpts, meta descriptions, or search indexing.

2. Using JavaScript/TypeScript packages

For client-side conversion, you have a few npm package options:

• @portabletext/toolkit - The modern, official package with a toPlainText function
• @sanity/block-content-to-plain-text - The older package (still works)

Example usage:

import {toPlainText} from '@portabletext/toolkit'

const plainText = toPlainText(portableTextBlocks)

3. Simple custom function

If you want a lightweight solution without dependencies, here's a simple function from the Sanity docs:

function toPlainText(blocks = []) {
  return blocks
    .map(block => {
      if (block._type !== 'block' || !block.children) {
        return ''
      }
      return block.children.map(child => child.text).join('')
    })
    .join('\n\n')
}

This traverses the Portable Text block structure and extracts just the text content, joining paragraphs with double line breaks.

Which approach to use?

• Use pt::text() in GROQ if you're querying data and want plain text in your API response
• Use @portabletext/toolkit if you need to convert Portable Text on the client side
• Use the custom function if you want zero dependencies and a simple solution

All of these will give you functionality equivalent to Prismic's asText() method!