BBCode

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title: "BBCode" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["lightweight-markup-languages"] description: "Lightweight markup language used in message boards" topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Lightweight markup language used in message boards ::

BBCode ("Bulletin Board Code") is a lightweight markup language used to format messages in many Internet forum software. It was first introduced in 1998. The available "tags" of BBCode are usually indicated by square brackets ([ and ]) surrounding a keyword, and are parsed before being translated into HTML.

Tags

::data[format=table]

column header 1	column header 2
table cell 1	table cell 2
::

|- | colspan="3" style="text-align: center;" | Source: |}

Implementation

BBCode is typically implemented by applying a series of regular expression 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 , i.e. [quote=**text**[/quote].

References

References

1. "BBCode history".
2. "HTML Text Formatting".
3. e.g. BOINC Project Forums et al.
4. "BBCode tags reference".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::