I. Introduction

A. Overview

The New BBCode Parser

The New BBCode Parser (NBBC) is a fully-validating, high-speed, extensible parser for the BBCode document language, written in PHP, compatible with PHP 4.0.5+ and PHP 5. It converts BBCode input into HTML output, and can guarantee that the output will be fully conformant to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard no matter how badly-mangled the BBCode input is.

What is BBCode? BBCode is a document-formatting language, similar to HTML, only designed to be much simpler to use. BBCode was popularized by various forum and bulletin-board services throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, and is now a de-facto standard; however, most BBCode parsers, which convert that BBCode into displayable HTML, are non-validating, meaning that they do not guarantee that their output will necessarily be "good" HTML. Some are so over-simplified that they are vulnerable to a number of security attacks. NBBC is designed to be an easy drop-in replacement for most existing BBCode parsers, and is designed to be both validating and secure.

NBBC comes built-in with a number of useful features:

Output is always XHTML 1.0 Strict conformant.
Output is protected against many common user-input attacks, such as XSS attacks.
Smileys, such as :-), are converted into <img> tags, and a large library of common smiley images is included.
Includes a library supporting all the standard BBCode codes found on most popular bulletin boards and web forums.
Supports "wiki links," which can be an easy way for users to reference wiki pages on your site if you also have a wiki installed.
The list of codes is fully extensible; you can add and remove codes at any time.
Tightly encapsulated in classes and doesn't pollute the global namespace, so it's easy to drop into existing environments.
The entire parser consists of only four files, only one of which you ever need to include directly, which also makes it easy to drop into existing environments.
The standard library includes support for not only extremely common tags like [b] and [i], but also supports nearly all the tags found on most major forums and bulletin boards: [center], [list], [code], and [quote], among others, with all their various flags and parameters.
Best of all, it's free! NBBC is covered under the New BSD Open-Source License, so it can be used anywhere, anywhen, in any project, for any reason.

[ Next: B. Why BBCode? ]