Bulletin board code

Bulletin Board Codes or BBCodes are a way to format posts in SMF and in many other places online. For an explanation of the buttons in the post page, see Basic Bulletin Board Codes. This article explains the important concept of nesting.

Nesting BBCodes

The general format of a BBCode has three parts: an opening tag, the inside content and a closing tag, as shown below:

[open]      text inside      [/close]
[b]         bold text        [/b]

When Order Matters Part 1

You can place one BBCode tag inside another as long as the child tag is closed before the parent tag. For example, the correct way to make bold and italic text is:

[b][i]bold & italic text[/i][/b]

You can also do it in the following way - both are valid, just the tags are in reverse order:

[i][b]bold & italic text[/b][/i]

The correct method is shown more clearly when the tags are indented:

[b]
    [i]
        bold & italic text
    [/i]
[/b]

The next example is incorrectly nested, which is easily shown with indented tags:

[b][i]bold & italic text[/b][/i]
[b]
    [i]
        bold & italic text
[/b]
    [/i]

When Order Matters Part 2

Note that the order in which tags are nested is important when text-formatting tags like size, bold, or italic are paired with the following text-alignment tags: center, left, right, and pre. Formatting tags must be placed inside alignment tags. For example, for the size tag to change the font, it must be placed as follows:

[center][size=36pt][b][u]text[/u][/b][/size][/center]

Nesting the size tags as per the example below will result in this tag not working:

[size=36pt][center][b][u]text[/u][/b][/center][/size]

See Also

• Basic Bulletin Board Codes
• Alphabetical list of all bulletin board codes

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