The easiest way to install the bbcode module is via PyPI, e.g.:

pip install bbcode

You can download the latest package from:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bbcode

Or view the source on GitHub:

https://github.com/dcwatson/bbcode

Python, tested with versions 2.5 through 3.3.

# Using the default parser.
import bbcode
html = bbcode.render_html(text)

# Installing simple formatters.
parser = bbcode.Parser()
parser.add_simple_formatter('hr', '<hr />', standalone=True)
parser.add_simple_formatter('sub', '<sub>%(value)s</sub>')
parser.add_simple_formatter('sup', '<sup>%(value)s</sup>')

# A custom render function.
def render_color(tag_name, value, options, parent, context):
    return '<span style="color:%s;">%s</span>' % (tag_name, value)

# Installing advanced formatters.
for color in ('red', 'blue', 'green', 'yellow', 'black', 'white'):
    parser.add_formatter(color, render_color)

# Calling format with context.
html = parser.format(text, somevar='somevalue')

• More tag options for how/when to escape - for instance, you can specify whether to escape html or perform cosmetic replacements on a tag-by-tag basis. Same for auto-linking and transforming newlines.

• More liberal (and accurate) automatic link creation, using John Gruber's URL regular expression: http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matching_urls

• Does not swallow unrecognized tags. For example, [3] will be output as [3], not silently ignored.

• More flexible tag option parser. Tags may have standard bbcode options, for example [url=something]text[/url], but may also have named options, for example [url=something alt=icon]text[/url]. These options are passed to the render function as a standard python dictionary.

• Ability to specify tag opening and closing delimiters (default: [ and ]). A side benefit of this is being able to use this library to selectively strip HTML tags from a string by using < and >.

• Includes a runnable unittest suite.

• Python 3 support.