About

Legacy bulletin board systems (forums) like phpBB, vBulletin, and XenForo often rely on BBCode (Bulletin Board Code) rather than standard HTML to sanitize user input. Content creators and community managers moving content from blogs or CMS platforms to these forums face the tedious task of manually replacing angle brackets with square brackets. This tool automates that translation process.

The converter is designed to strip away invisible container tags like <div> or <span> that have no semantic meaning in a forum context, while rigorously preserving the structure of lists, the integrity of hyperlinks, and formatting like bold or italics. It ensures that your formatted post looks identical on the forum as it did in your editor.

Formulas

The logic relies on a recursive traversal of the DOM tree (Document Object Model). Unlike simple string replacement, this method respects nesting order.

convert(node) →

{

[b] + convert(children) + [/b] if bold[url=...] + convert(children) + [/url] if linknode.text if text

Reference Data

Element	HTML Input	BBCode Output
Bold Text	<b>Text</b>	[b]Text[/b]
Italic Text	<i>Text</i>	[i]Text[/i]
Underline	<u>Text</u>	[u]Text[/u]
Link	<a href="url">Link</a>	[url=url]Link[/url]
Image	<img src="url">	[img]url[/img]
Quote	<blockquote>Text</blockquote>	[quote]Text[/quote]
Code	<code>var x</code>	[code]var x[/code]
List Item	<li>Item</li>	[*]Item

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. If you have bold text inside a link (e.g., <a href='...'><b>Click</b></a></pre>), the tool correctly generates [url=...][b]Click[/b][/url].

They are ignored. BBCode generally does not support arbitrary CSS (like font-family or margin). The tool focuses on semantic tags (b, i, u, img) to ensure compatibility across different forum software.

Yes. Ordered (<ol>) and unordered (<ul>) lists are converted into [list] structures with [*] denoting list items.

The conversion happens entirely in your browser. No data is sent to a server. However, always review the output code before posting, as forum administrators may have specific restrictions.