BBCode

Bulletin Board Code or BBCode is a lightweight markup language used to format posts in many message boards or forums. The available tags are usually indicated by square brackets surrounding a keyword, and they are parsed by the message board system before being translated into a markup language that web browsers understand&mdash;usually HTML or XHTML.

BBCode was devised to provide a safer, easier and more limited way of allowing users to format their messages. Previously, many message boards allowed the users to include HTML formatting, a side effect of which was that malformed HTML could disrupt the page's layout, or HTML could be used to run JavaScript leading to XSS attacks. Some implementations of BBCode have suffered problems related to the way they translate the BBCode into HTML, which could negate the security that was intended to be given by BBCode. An alternative is a properly written HTML filter (many of which are freely available).

Although the basic tags of BBCode are similar in most internet forum software, there is currently no standards document for BBCode and there are consequently many incompatible variants. Some variants are case-sensitive while others are not. Some variants have tags which highlight the formatting of HTML, ASP, PHP, SQL and other markup languages and programming languages.

BBCode tags
The following are the most common BBCode tags available to most modern message boards, and are displayed here with their HTML equivalents. However, the effect of these tags can be changed substantially, and the effect may not be identical on all sites using BBCode.

External Link

 * BBCode.org