I consider bbcoder to be stable so you won't see many updates to it in the future. It is perfectly fine to use in production. The gem itself is pretty simple so it should work across the board with newer frameworks etc. If you find any issues or think it needs a feature please submit an issue.

• Non-regex based (except for the split)

• Handles deep nesting of tags

• Generates good html even from bad input

• Easy configuration to add new tags

• Tags supported by default:

p, b, i, u, s, del, ins, ol, ul, li, dl, dt, dd, quote, code, spoiler, url, img, youtube, sub, sup

BBCoder.new(h(text)).to_html
# or
h("[p]my string[/p]").bbcode_to_html
# h() is a Rails helper function, you may use CGI.escapeHTML instead

See configuration section below on adding new parseable tags

gem install bbcoder

bbcoder is not meant to handle smileys, autolinking or xss attacks. There are other libraries to help do this for us. I also do not consider these elements part of bbcode itself (even though there is no standard) so bbcoder will not provide support for them except in this README to give examples on how to combine them together.

Rails 2.x has a helper auto_link by default that can do this for you. For Rails 3.x you can install the rails_autolink gem.

At the moment I use a jquery library to display smileys after the page has loaded. The library I use https://github.com/JangoSteve/jQuery-CSSEmoticons however it would be nice to see a gem that can parse smileys out of text into appropriate html elements with specific tags. CSS3 font-face anyone?

Please make sure you escaped or sanitized all HTML in the string before passing it to bbcoder!

bbcoder will now do a whitelist check against img tags and url tags by default and only allow http/https links. You can override this by putting in your own configuration if you wish. If you find any other flaws or holes please report so we can fix. bbcoder will not sanitize the rest of your input, it will only attempt to whitelist the actual html elements it will generate.

When typing into a textarea a user will use newlines to indicate space between lines. This is not translated properly into br tags. I do not consider this a function for bbcoder either atm, however I do use it in combination with XSS/Sanitize above:

  def bbcode(text)
    Sanitize.clean(text.to_s).bbcode_to_html.gsub(/\n|\r\n/, "<br />").html_safe
  end

BBCoder.configure do
  tag :b, :as => :strong

  tag :sub, :singular => true do
    %(<sub>#{singular? ? meta : content}</sub>)
  end

  tag :sup, :singular => true do
    %(<sup>#{singular? ? meta : content}</sup>)
  end

  tag :ul
  tag :ol
  tag :li, :parents => [:ol, :ul]

  tag :url, :match_link => /^https?:\/\// do
    if meta.nil? || meta.empty?
      %(<a href="#{content}">#{content}</a>)
    else
      %(<a href="#{meta}">#{content}</a>)
    end
  end

  tag :img, :match => /^https?:\/\/.*(png|bmp|jpe?g|gif)$/, :singular => true do
    %(<a href="#{singular? ? meta : content}"><img src="#{singular? ? meta : content}" /></a>)
  end

  tag :code do
    <<-EOS
<div class="bbcode-code #{meta}">
  <pre>#{content}</pre>
</div>
    EOS
  end

  remove :spoiler # Removes [spoiler]
end

Options for #tag

• :as (symbol) -> use this as the html element ([b] becomes strong)
• :match (regex) -> convert this tag and its content to html only if the content and meta matches the regex (see img tag above for example)
• :match_meta (regex) -> same as :match except only for meta
• :match_content (regex) -> same as :match except only for content
• :match_link (regex) -> special :match case, will match meta if it exists otherwise tries to match content (see url tag for usage)
• :parents ([symbol]) -> ignore this tag if there is no open tag that matches its parents
• :singular (true|false) -> use this if the tag does not require an ending tag

When you pass a block to #tag it is expecting you to return a string. You have two variables available to your block:

• meta -> Everything after the '=' in the opening tag (with [quote="Legendary"] meta returns '"Legendary"' and with [quote] meta returns nil)
• content -> Everything between the two tags (with [b]strong arm[/b] content returns 'strong arm')
• singular? -> Tells you if this tag is being parsed in singular form or if it had an ending tag (affects if content has any data)

You can remove all configured tags by calling BBCoder.configuration.clear.

Original author: John "asceth" Long