Parsing BBCode in a PHP script

Well if you've ever joined a forum/community when you go to post most of the time they will have BBCode enabled, but what if you want to make your own application and allow BBCode. Well here's a guide that will explain how you can allow BBCode.

Lets say you're getting your text/message from a mysql database and you want to take the message and enable it and turn BBCode into html. First of all you need to get the variable for that message.

EX:

$text = $row['message'];

And the other code that will turn the BBCode into html. Heres an example for making bold text:

//the pattern to be matched

$pattern[0] = "/[b](.*?)[/b]/is";



//the replacement

$replace[0] = "$1";





//the variable for the replace

$text = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $text);

And then when you want to display it out on the page just use echo.

If you want to add more patterns to replace just use these:

$pattern[1] = "";

$replace[1] = "";



$pattern[2] = "";

$replace[2] = "";



$pattern[3] = "";

$replace[3] = "";



$pattern[4] = "";

$replace[4] = "";

Change the number when adding a new pattern and replace.

Hope this tutorial helped!

-Ryan