BBCode Viewer
Paste BBCode — the [b]…[/b], [url]…[/url], [quote]…[/quote] markup used by forums — and see it rendered as formatted text on the right. The converter escapes your input first and then translates the tags, so the preview is built safely and shown inside a sandboxed frame. It handles bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, images, quotes, inline and block code, lists, colors, sizes, and centering. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you paste is uploaded, so you can preview posts and signatures privately.
How to use the BBCode Viewer
Type or paste BBCode into the left box and the rendered result appears on the right as you type. Click Example to load a snippet that exercises most of the supported tags, or Clear to empty the editor. Tags can be nested — [b][i]bold italic[/i][/b] works — and unrecognized or malformed tags are left visible as plain text rather than silently dropped, which makes it easy to spot a typo like a missing slash.
Supported tags include [b], [i], [u], and [s] for styling; [url] and [url=link] for links; [img] for images; [quote] and [quote=name] for blockquotes; [code] for preformatted text that is not parsed further; [list] with [*] items; and [color=red], [size=4], and [center] for appearance. The preview renders inside a sandboxed iframe, so the formatting is shown faithfully without any of the converted markup being able to affect this page.
What is BBCode?
BBCode, short for Bulletin Board Code, is a lightweight markup language created so forum members could format their posts without being handed raw HTML. It appeared in the late 1990s with the early bulletin-board systems and became ubiquitous through phpBB, vBulletin, and the many forums built on them. The design uses square brackets in deliberate imitation of HTML's angle brackets — [b]bold[/b] mirrors <b>bold</b> — which makes it instantly readable to anyone who has seen a tag before, while remaining limited to a safe, fixed vocabulary.
That safety was the whole point. Letting untrusted users post arbitrary HTML on a shared site is an open door to cross-site scripting, image-based tracking, and layout-breaking markup. By exposing only a curated set of BBCode tags and converting them to a controlled subset of HTML on the server, forum software gave people expressive formatting — bold, quotes, links, images, colored text — without ever rendering anything the user typed verbatim. The converter, not the user, decides what HTML is produced. This tool follows the same principle: it escapes everything you type first, so any literal angle brackets become harmless text, and only then maps the bracket tags onto safe HTML elements.
Many tags have variants that carry an argument after an equals sign: [url=https://example.com]text[/url] sets the link target, [quote=Alice] attributes a quotation, and [color=#ff0000] or [size=5] control appearance. Compared with Markdown, which has largely won the broader web, BBCode is more verbose and less suited to writing prose, but its explicit open-and-close tags map cleanly onto nested HTML and it remains entrenched wherever legacy forum software still runs. Understanding it is useful any time you migrate old forum content, build a community feature, or simply want to preview how a post will look before submitting it.
Common use cases
- Previewing forum posts. See how a post, reply, or signature will render before you submit it.
- Writing signatures. Compose a styled forum signature and check the result.
- Migrating content. Inspect how legacy BBCode looks as HTML when moving off old forum software.
- Learning the tags. Experiment with color, size, quote, and list tags to see what each does.
- Private drafting. Draft and preview a post locally without sending it to any server.