HTML to BBCode Converter

What this converter actually does

Forums and CMS platforms speak two different dialects. phpBB, vBulletin, and most old-school message boards use BBCode, those square-bracket tags like [b] and [url]. Your blog, your CMS, your scraped page? That’s HTML. This tool walks between the two, in either direction, and updates the output the moment you type.

Pick a direction at the top. Paste your markup. The other side fills in. Swap to flip the conversion and feed the result straight back as new input, which is handy when you’re round-tripping a snippet to check that nothing got mangled.

What gets mapped

Here’s the tag pairing, both ways:

• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough map between <b>/<strong>, <i>/<em>, <u>, <s>/<del> and [b] [i] [u] [s]
• Links turn <a href="...">text</a> into [url=...]text[/url] and back
• Images swap <img src="..."> for [img]...[/img]
• Lists convert <ul>/<ol> and <li> into [list], [list=1], and [*] markers
• Quotes map <blockquote> to [quote]
• Code handles both <pre><code> and bare <code>, collapsing to [code]
• Color and size read inline style="color:..." or font-size:Npx and emit [color=...] and [size=N]

Going from BBCode to HTML, the tool escapes raw angle brackets first. So if your forum post literally contains <script> as text, it comes out as <script> rather than a live tag. Cleaner, and safer to drop into a page.

A quick example

Say you copy this out of a forum:

[b]Toolsvu[/b] has [url=https://toolsvu.com]286 tools[/url].
[quote]Worth a look.[/quote]

Flip to BBCode to HTML and you get:

<b>Toolsvu</b> has <a href="https://toolsvu.com">286 tools</a>.
<blockquote>Worth a look.</blockquote>

Paste-ready. No hand-editing brackets.

Things to watch out for

BBCode is a smaller language than HTML, so the HTML to BBCode direction is lossy on purpose. Tables, divs with classes, nested spans, data attributes, all the structural stuff that has no BBCode equivalent gets stripped down to its text. That’s expected. BBCode was never meant to carry layout.

The color and size mapping reads inline styles only. If your HTML colors things through a CSS class or a stylesheet, there’s nothing in the markup itself for the converter to grab, so that styling won’t survive the trip. Inline style="color:#5b4fff" works; class="accent" does not.

One more thing on lists. BBCode’s [*] is an item marker, not a closing tag, so deeply nested lists can get flattened. For simple bullet and numbered lists you’re fine. For three-level outlines, eyeball the result.

Everything runs locally in your browser, so even a 50KB forum dump never leaves your machine. Paste away.

FAQ

Does it handle both directions?

Yep. Toggle HTML to BBCode or BBCode to HTML at the top, and there’s a Swap button that flips the direction and reuses the current output as the next input.

Why did my <div> and <table> disappear?

BBCode has no equivalent for them. When converting to BBCode, unsupported tags get stripped to their inner text since there’s no bracket tag to map them onto.

Will my colors carry over?

Only if they’re inline. The converter reads style="color:..." and font-size:Npx directly off the element. Colors set through CSS classes aren’t in the markup, so they can’t be translated.

Is the HTML output safe to paste into a page?

When converting from BBCode, raw <, >, and & in your text get escaped first, so stray characters won’t render as accidental tags. Generated tags like <b> and <a> are clean and ready to use.

Does anything get uploaded?

Nope. It’s all client-side JavaScript. Your markup stays in the tab.