HTML to BBCode Converter

Post web content to forums without losing formatting

Forums that use BBCode usually strip HTML from posts, so pasting an article, changelog or product description loses its bold text, links and lists. This HTML to BBCode converter walks through your HTML and writes the matching BBCode tags, so your formatting survives.

Example

<h2>Release 2.4</h2>
<p>This update makes <strong>search faster</strong> and fixes <a href="https://example.com/bugs">12 bugs</a>.</p>
<ul>
  <li>New <em>dark mode</em></li>
  <li>Improved <span style="color: green">sync</span></li>
</ul>

[size=5][b]Release 2.4[/b][/size]

This update makes [b]search faster[/b] and fixes [url=https://example.com/bugs]12 bugs[/url].

[list]
[*]New [i]dark mode[/i]
[*]Improved [color=green]sync[/color]
[/list]

How HTML maps to BBCode

• Text styles – strong/b → [b], em/i → [i], u → [u], del/s → [s], mark → [highlight].
• Headings – BBCode has no universal heading tag, so headings become bold text in a larger [size] (h1 = 6 down to h6 = 2).
• Links and images – [url=…], [email] for mailto links, and [img] with a WxH size when width and height are set.
• Lists – ul → [list], ol → [list=1] (or a, i… for other numbering types).
• Blocks – blockquote → [quote], pre → [code] (keeping a language-* class as [code=lang]), details → [spoiler], hr → [hr].
• Tables – rows and cells become [table], [tr], [td] and [th].
• Inline CSS – color, font-size, font-family, bold, italic, underline, strike-through and text-align in style attributes are turned into the matching tags. Legacy <font> tags are handled too.
• YouTube embeds – an embedded YouTube iframe becomes [youtube]VIDEO_ID[/youtube].

Converting text pasted from Google Docs or Word

Rich text copied from a word processor arrives as HTML in which nearly every run of text is a span with inline styles: a font family, a size in points, sometimes a color. Because the converter turns inline font-family, font-size and color into BBCode, such a paste can come out wrapped in [font=Arial] and [size] tags around every sentence.

Forum readers rarely need those. For a clean post, paste the text into a plain HTML editor or your CMS first, so that only structure (headings, bold, links, lists) remains, then convert. If you want to see what the pasted markup really contains, run it through the HTML formatter before converting; long chains of styled spans are easy to spot once the code is indented.

Forum compatibility

Core tags (b, i, u, url, img, quote, code, list, color, size) work almost everywhere. [table], [spoiler], [youtube] and [highlight] depend on the forum software or installed extensions, and [size] may use a 1–7 scale on one board and pixels or percentages on another. If a tag shows up literally in your post, your forum does not support it; remove it or replace it with plain text.

Tips

Scripts, forms and most layout wrappers have no BBCode equivalent and are reduced to their text. For the cleanest result, convert just the article body rather than a whole page. Check how the post will look with the BBCode viewer, or convert BBCode back with BBCode to HTML. If your source is Markdown, render it first with Markdown to HTML. Everything runs locally in your browser.