UBBCode help

Hi. There's not really a "help" forum on the BB, so I hope this is on-topic here. (If not, please feel free to forward it to a more appropriate forum.)

While working on a post, I found myself in a position where I needed to post a literal [ I ] (without the spaces, of course) - not to tag text as italic, but to supply missing information from an abbreviated quotation.

As you would expect, the forum software interpreted it as an italics tag, turning the remainder of my post into italic text.

Is there any way to "escape" UBBCode as literal text, or to fool the forum into thinking it isn't a tag? I can find nothing in the documentation, either on this forum or in any other implementations of BBCode I have looked up on the Web. (I also don't want to disable code entirely for the post, if it can be avoided.)

If someone wanted to write a post about how to use BBCode, how could they do it?

 

Yes, but that only works as long as you don't use any italics later. If you do, the forum software will italicize too much. If you type (substituting braces for brackets):

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Jones wrote that &quot;{I}t was clear that the accused was {i}not{/i} guilty.&quot;</pre>[/QUOTE]then you will get

Jones wrote that "t was clear that the accused was not guilty."

The forum software interprets the tags as widely as possible. If it interpreted them narrowly, it wouldn't be an issue, at least not as frequently.

 

Yeah *sigh* I guess it might have to be. It's bad style, though - parentheses and square brackets have different meanings when you are citing text.

I guess the UBB people didn't anticipate people wanting to use those characters as part of their posts.

 

testing testing testing.

Cool, it works! I had just assumed that since the forum's markup tags weren't HTML, it wouldn't parse entities as entities, so I just never tried this. Thanks!