smontanaro 

Every now and then, someone wants to display some literal forum tags, generally to help out another user. As far as I've ever been able to determine, there is no way to escape either the leading left square bracket or the trailing right square bracket. As a result, helpers are forced to wing it, generally by adding a space after the left or before the right. Is there no better way to do that?

IBkatherine

Can you link to what you are talking about? I'm not sure if i'm aware of what you're referring to

Trakhak

If you're referring to quotes of previous posts: when people are sloppy about quoting, they lop off part of a tag, with the result that the mangled tag appears along with the quoted material and the other tag.

smontanaro 

Here's an example I posted today. I wanted to include examples of what the quote tags looked like, but as far as I know you have to "break" the tag as I did.

https://www.bikeforums.net/23195958-post83004.html

Does BBcode have something like an HTML entity I can use in place of the literal square brackets?

smontanaro 

This seems to be a pervasive problem with BBCode. I saw suggestions to use a code block: but that doesn't work (the quote tags are still interpreted).

Another suggestion was to surround the brackets with something which doesn't add whitespace, like a bold tag.

[IMG] [/IMG]

That seems to work, modulo the somewhat extraneous bolding.

Iride01 

[asdf]
[ asdf ]

I'm not sure what you are saying you can't do either. I just typed the above without doing anything special.

Or I guess maybe you are wanting to be able to show them the actual BB code. That is problematic.

IBJoel

So you just want the ability to display BBcode?
What is the actual problem with just including the space in the brackets?

smontanaro 

As pointed out on the (I think) linked post outside BF, if what you are trying to do is show someone an example how to do something, they will naively cut-n-paste your example, then complain that it doesn't work, because, of course, they are no longer valid BBCode tags. In this day and age, even pasting my bolded example will trip some people up because it will paste the bold attributes on some (many?) platforms. People will have to remember to "paste as plain text."

It's mostly just annoying that you can't simply create straightforward examples people can use. How long has BBCode been around? And the various forum tools which use it? And there's still no way to escape a square bracket (or any other character as far as I know).

unterhausen

Have you ever looked at the source for an entire subforum? It's amazing vb works at all.

smontanaro 

I have not. Managed to not mess with PHP my entire career.