BBCode

BBCode ("Bulletin Board Code") is a

lightweight markup language A lightweight markup language (LML), also termed a simple or humane markup language, is a markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Lightwei ...

used to format messages in much

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

software, first introduced in 1998. The available "tags" of BBCode are usually indicated by

square brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

(

 /code> and /code>) surrounding a keyword, and are parsed 

Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a String (computer science), string of Symbol (formal), symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal gra ...
 before being translated into HTML 







The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard  markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as  Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
.

 Tags




  Implementation 

BBCode is typically implemented by applying a series of regular expression 




A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a  search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or  ...
 string-replace operations upon the input. Because regular expressions are limited in analyzing the structure of text input, this has the artifact that any non-hierarchical BBCode input will be transformed into invalid non-hierarchical HTML without error.

Applying traditional parsing techniques is made difficult by ambiguities in the markup, such as in , where the input can either be interpreted as "text" quoted from someone called , or the bolded text "text" surrounded by  and {{code, lang=bbcode, code=quote 



Quote is a hypernym of quotation, as the repetition or copy of a prior statement or thought.  Quotation marks are punctuation marks that indicate a quotation. Both ''quotation'' and ''quotation marks'' are sometimes abbreviated as "quote(s)".
 C ...
}, i.e.  uote=text[/quote/code>.

_See_also

*_Markdown.html" ;"title="quote.html" ;"title="uote=text[/quote">uote=text[/quote/code>.

 See also

* Markdown">quote.html" ;"title="uote=text[/quote">uote=text[/quote/code>.

 See also

* Markdown

 References



  External links 


BBCode users guide

RTF/HTML to BBCode online converter
Lightweight markup languages