vB Code (the [] code)

[slooksterPSV]

Hey I'm just curious on how this works. I was reading on it in the FAQ. You guys have used the [ coding ] things. How do you get something like this working on a website?
I think this shows:

[img][/img]

I think it would prove useful for some situations not just for Forums.

 

[thecow]

The brackets are specific to vBulletin. This is the code that operates the forum. http://www.vbulletin.com/

From the bottom of the page:

Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.0.0
Copyright ©2000 - 2004, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright 2002-2004, MacRumors.com​

 

[slooksterPSV]

Wow camio (mozilla browser) cut that bottom part off. I didn't see that.

 

[Knox]

Of course, nothing stopping you emulating what vBulletin does on your own site - you just need to run the text through a process to replace the [ code ] tags with the appropriate HTML.

For example, using PHP

print preg_replace("/\[code\](.+)\[\/code\]/Usi", "<pre>\\1</pre>", $text);

(vBulletin adds a bit more than just <pre> but that gives you the general idea, also, that code isn't completely perfect as it'll get confused if the code part contains the tag [ code ])

 

[slooksterPSV]

I was just actually coming to post that. You could make a sort of scripted compiler, in the sense that you replace the code with the code that is programmed in, and have it show like vB Bulliten does. I may have to try that.

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm surprised there isn't a script out there that does this conversion. There are a lot of other forum systems that use the exact same set of codes using the square brackets. But then I guess coding it in JS or whatever would be pretty easy....