How to convert in either direction

Paste markup and press Html turns UBB or UBB to Html. Both directions run in the tab: the page rewrites the text itself, nothing is uploaded and no request carries it anywhere.

The converter handles the tags forum software really carries — formatting, links, images, quotes, lists, headings and code blocks — and leaves tags it does not know in place instead of deleting them, so you can see what still needs a hand.

  1. Paste the HTML or the UBB markup into the input box.
  2. Press Html turns UBB to rewrite HTML into forum tags, or UBB to Html for the other direction.
  3. Copy puts the result on the clipboard, Clear empties the box and the panel.
  4. Convert one block of content at a time; check the output before you post it, because the converter is not a filter for untrusted markup.

Which tags are converted, and what happens to the rest

HTML to UBB

<b>, <strong>, <i>, <em>, <u>, <s>, <strike>, <del>, <sub>, <sup>, <code>, <pre> and <blockquote> become their UBB equivalents, <br> becomes a line break, <hr> becomes [hr], and <p>, <div>, table rows and <h1>–<h6> end a line. A heading keeps its words on their own line but not its level, because forum code has no agreed heading tag.

<ul> becomes [list], <ol> becomes [list=1], <li> becomes [*], table cells are separated by a tab, <img> becomes [img]…[/img] (an image carrying smile="3" becomes [s:3]) and <a href="…">label</a> becomes [url=…]label[/url]. Event handler attributes such as onclick are dropped on the way.

UBB to HTML

[b], [i], [u], [strike] and [s], [sub], [sup], [code] and [code=php], [quote] and [quote=name], [blockquote], [hr], [h1]–[h6], [align=…], [size=…], [color=…], [font=…] and [backcolor=…] are translated, [list] and [list=1] or [list=a] become lists with [*] as the item marker, and [url], [url=…], [img] and [email] become links and images.

HTML you type inside UBB is escaped, so x <b>y</b> comes back as x &lt;b&gt;y&lt;/b&gt; instead of as markup, and [code] blocks keep their line breaks inside <pre><code>. The name in [quote=name] is not carried over: <blockquote> has no place to keep it.

Entities and unknown tags

HTML entities are decoded once: &amp;, &lt;, &gt;, &quot;, &#39; and &nbsp; become their characters, while &amp;lt; stays &lt; instead of turning into a tag. Tags the HTML side does not know disappear but their text stays, so a <span> wrapper is invisible in the output while its words are not.

Tags the UBB side does not know — [table], [spoiler], smiley codes such as [s:3] — are passed through exactly as typed, so you can finish them by hand.

Privacy and limits

Both directions are pure text work inside the page: no upload, no request, and nothing is kept after a reload. A 100 KB document converts in about 0.2 s in Chrome.

This is a markup converter, not an HTML sanitiser: it drops onclick-style attributes and escapes markup on the UBB side, but sanitise untrusted HTML before rendering it on a page.

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