This is an extendible BBCode parser for JavaScript.

Online demo: patorjk.com/bbcode-previewer

I had looked around a little bit and noticed that the existing JavaScript BBCode parsers had at least a few of the following issues:

• They didn't report errors on misaligned tags (e.g., [b][u]test[/b][/u]).
• They couldn't handle tags of the same type that were nested within each other (e.g., [color=red]red[color=blue]blue[/color]red again[/color]). This happens because their regex will look for the first closing tag it can find.
• They couldn't handle BBCode's list format (e.g., [list][*]item 1[*]item 2[/list]).
• They didn't report errors on incorrect parent-child relationships (e.g., [list][td]item 1?[/td][/list]).
• They weren't easily extensible.

So I wrote this module in an attempt to solve these issues.

Including xbbcode.js will expose its API through an XBBCODE object that you can use to process BBCode into HTML.

<head>
  <!-- Optional styling for .xbbcode-* classes -->
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="xbbcode.css">
</head>
<body>
  <script src="xbbcode.js"></script>
  <script>
    var result = XBBCODE.process({
      text: "[b]Hello world[/b]",
      removeMisalignedTags: false,
      addInLineBreaks: false
    });
    console.error("Errors", result.error);
    console.dir(result.errorQueue);
    console.log(result.html);  //=> <span class="xbbcode-b">Hello world</span>
  </script>
</body>

To add a new tag to your BBCode, add properties to the "tags" object inside of the XBBCODE object.

For example, say you wanted to add a tag called [googleit] which would change its contents into a link of its google search results. You'd implement that by adding this to the tags object:

"googleit": {
    openTag: function(params,content) {
        var website = 'http://www.google.com/#q=' + content;
        return '<a href="' + website + '">';
    },
    closeTag: function(params,content) {
        return '</a>';
    }
}

That will transform this BBCode:

[googleit]ta-da![/googleit]

Into this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/#q=ta-da!">ta-da!</a>

Refer to xbbcode.js for additional configuration options and other examples.

Hopefully this will be somewhat useful for you. If you have any suggestions or find any bugs please let me know.