convert-md-to-bbcode 📊

🔨 Convert Markdown to BBCode.

Give a ⭐️ if this project helped you!

Motivation

Markdown became the default format for documentation, but plenty of platforms still do not render it - they accept BBCode instead. If you keep your documents in Markdown (e.g. next to the source files in a repository), publishing them there means converting the same text over and over by hand. This tool does that conversion in one command.

A typical example is TradingView, whose script publication descriptions accept a small set of BBCode tags (documented in the Pine Script docs): [b], [i], [s], [pine], [list], [list=1], [*], [quote], [url=...], [image] - and the core of that set works on any classic BBCode forum.

Preview 🎉

Where BBCode is required 📍

A surprising number of platforms still speak BBCode only:

• ✅ TradingView - script publication descriptions
• ✅ phpBB forums
• ✅ XenForo communities
• ✅ vBulletin and MyBB boards
• ✅ Bitcointalk and most cryptocurrency forums
• ✅ Steam guides, profiles and workshop pages
• ✅ ProBoards and Invision Community sites

[!NOTE] The emitted dialect comes from TradingView, but [b], [i], [s], [url=...], [list] and [quote] are the common BBCode core, so the output works on classic forums too. The differences are [image] (many engines use [img] instead) and [pine] (TradingView-only; other engines use [code]).

Features ✨

• 🔄 Converts bold, italic, strikethrough, links and images to their BBCode tags
• ⌨️ Maps inline code to [b] (the dialect has no inline-code tag)
• 🧱 Renders headings as plain [b] lines (BBCode has no headers)
• 🎨 Optional --pinecoders style renders ## headings as █ [b]SECTION[/b] lines and drops the first H1 (the PineCoders publication convention; the publish form has its own title field, --keep-h1 restores it)
• 📐 Puts fenced code blocks and tables into [pine] blocks, so monospace keeps ASCII diagrams and columns aligned
• 📋 Preserves list nesting with nested [list] / [list=1] tags
• 🔗 Degrades relative links to plain text (they would point nowhere outside the repository)
• 📦 Zero dependencies
• 📘 Ships TypeScript types and a programmatic API

Usage

Installation:

npm install convert-md-to-bbcode

import { convertMarkdownToBBCode } from 'convert-md-to-bbcode';

// Faithful conversion: every heading becomes a plain [b] line
const bbcode = convertMarkdownToBBCode('# Title\n\n**Bold** text');

// PineCoders publication style: `█ [b]SECTION[/b]` headings, first H1 dropped
const description = convertMarkdownToBBCode('# Title\n\n**Bold** text', {
  style: 'pinecoders',
});

CLI

Try it without installing anything:

npx convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md

Or install globally:

npm install -g convert-md-to-bbcode

convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md                  # BBCode to stdout
convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md --out desc.txt   # write to a file
cat docs/indicator.md | convert-md-to-bbcode            # read from stdin
convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md --pinecoders     # PineCoders publication style
convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md --pinecoders --keep-h1   # ...but keep the top H1

Paste-ready: send the result straight to the clipboard and paste it into the publish form:

convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md | pbcopy                       # macOS
convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md | xclip -selection clipboard   # Linux (X11)
convert-md-to-bbcode docs/indicator.md | wl-copy                      # Linux (Wayland)

Development 🛠️

npm install
npm test             # unit tests
npm run coverage     # unit tests with a coverage report
npm run lint         # ESLint
npm run format       # Prettier over the whole repository

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to check issues page.

License

The MIT License @ 2026