Markdown to BBCode Converter

How to use the markdown to bbcode converter

1. Paste or type your Markdown text into the input area.
2. The tool automatically converts it to BBCode as you type.
3. Review the output to ensure all elements translated correctly.
4. Click the output area to select all, then copy the BBCode.
5. Paste the result directly into your forum post editor.

Supported Markdown Subset

This markdown to bbcode converter handles the elements most commonly used in documentation and forum posts. It does not attempt to parse every edge case of the full CommonMark specification.

• Headings: ATX style (# H1 through ###### H6) maps to [size=6] down to [size=1].
• Emphasis: *italic* becomes [i]italic[/i], and **bold** becomes [b]bold[/b].
• Inline code: Backtick-wrapped text converts to [font=monospace].
• Fenced code blocks: Triple backticks produce [code] tags. An optional language hint is ignored since standard BBCode lacks syntax highlighting.
• Links and images: [text](url) becomes [url=url]text[/url]. Images use [img].
• Lists: Unordered lists (- or *) map to [list]. Ordered lists (1.) map to [list=1].
• Blockquotes: Lines starting with > are wrapped in [quote] tags.
• Horizontal rules: Three or more dashes, asterisks or underscores become a line of dashes, since BBCode has no native rule tag.
• Tables: Pipe tables are converted to plain text columns separated by spaces, because standard BBCode does not support tables.

How Inline Formatting Works

The converter parses the Markdown with CommonMark rules first, so emphasis is resolved correctly (for example snake_case_name stays plain text) and each inline node is then written as its BBCode tag. The order matters: strong emphasis is matched before single emphasis to prevent conflicts.

For example, the input **hello** *world* is processed in two passes. First, the double-asterisk pattern matches **hello** and replaces it with [b]hello[/b]. Then the single-asterisk pattern matches *world* and produces [i]world[/i]. The final output is [b]hello[/b] [i]world[/i].

Inline code uses backticks. The pattern captures everything between single backticks and wraps it in [font=monospace] tags. This ensures that literal asterisks inside code spans are not accidentally treated as emphasis markers.

HTML Escaping and Safety

Text is copied as typed: BBCode is not HTML, so characters such as < and & are not turned into entities. Angle brackets become < and >, ampersands become &, and quotes become ". This prevents malicious scripts or broken markup from passing through to the forum.

Raw HTML is not interpreted, so a tag such as a div stays in the output as plain text and the forum decides how to display it. Link and image addresses are limited to http, https, mailto, tel, ftp and relative URLs; a link with any other scheme, such as javascript:, is written as its plain label. Text that itself contains square-bracket tags such as [b] is not escaped, because BBCode has no standard escape. Forums generally do not allow raw HTML anyway, so this behavior matches what you would see when posting manually.

Handling Lists and Blockquotes

Lists are detected by their leading markers. Unordered items start with -, * or + followed by a space. Ordered items start with digits and a period. Consecutive list items are grouped into a single [list] or [list=1] block.

Blockquotes require each line to start with >. Consecutive quoted lines are merged into one [quote] block. Nested quotes and nested lists are converted to nested [quote] and [list] tags.

When to Use Other Converters

This tool targets forum software that accepts BBCode. If you need different output formats, other converters may be more appropriate. To convert web pages back into Markdown, use the html to markdown tool. For rendering Markdown as standard web markup, try the markdown to html converter. If you just need the plain words without any formatting tags, the markdown to text utility strips everything cleanly.

For team chat platforms, the markdown to slack converter adapts syntax to Slack's specific mrkdwn format. And if your Markdown source contains characters that conflict with formatting syntax, the markdown escape tool adds the necessary backslashes.

Worked examples