bbsharp was designed from the ground up to provide a simple library for converting BBCode to HTML, while also providing powerful tools to parse and mutate a DOM representation of a BBCode document.
It's totally up to you whether you decide to use the more advanced features, or just stay with the simple 'BBCode In, HTML Out' subset of the API.
Simple load up the bbsharp.Easy namespace and away you go!
using bbsharp.Easy;
class Program
{
public static void Main()
{
string BBCode = "[b]Hello there![/b] I've been converted to HTML with [i]bbsharp[i].";
Console.WriteLine("BBCode: {0}", BBCode);
Console.WriteLine("HTML: {0}", BBCode.BbToHtml());
}
}
That's it. However, using the easy way means that you have no way of setting how bbsharp works. If you wish to add some custom tags, you'll need to use the more advanced way which is detailed below.
bbsharp was designed to be modular, and therefore only provides the HTML output features if you request them. Let's load up the bbsharp namespace and the HTML renderer namespace (we'll also need the System.Collections.Generic namespace later on):
using bbsharp;
using bbsharp.Renderers.Html;
using System.Collections.Generic;
Now use the BBCodeDocument.Load() method to parse a string of BBCode into a BBCode DOM. bbsharp is designed around a base class: BBCodeNode. Both the BBCodeDocument and BBCodeTextNode (a non-tag node) classes inherit from it. BBCodeNode was inspired by the System.Xml.XmlNode class from the .NET Framework and implements most of the methods that XmlNode does.
BBCodeDocument document = BBCodeDocument.Load("[b]Hello there![/b] I've been converted to HTML with [name]bbsharp[/name].");
Notice how we've used a custom tag - [name] - here. The BBCode parser doesn't care about specifics such as which tags exist and which don't. In fact, the only information we can give the BBCode parser about tags is which tags are singular (self closing)
Because we've used a custom tag, we need to implement a callback method for the HTML renderer to use. It must fit the method signature string (BBCodeNode, bool, object). The only two parameters we need to care about are the first two. The first parameter (of type BBCodeNode) is the node that our callback method is expected to convert to HTML. The second parameter is the ThrowOnError boolean. The callback method is expected to silently ignore errors if it is set to false. The third parameter is not intended to be directly used by the callback method, but it must be passed on when the callback method calls ToHtml() on any child nodes.
With all that information down, let's implement our callback method! In this case, we'll just render the [name] tag as an HTML <address> tag.
public static string RenderName(BBCodeNode Node, bool ThrowOnError, object LookupTable)
{
return "<address>" + Node.Children.ToHtml(ThrowOnError, LookupTable) + "</address>";
}
Simple, hey? Now all we need to do is register this custom tag with the HTML renderer and convert our BBCode into HTML.
// we're getting the default lookup table and adding to it since we don't want to reinvent the wheel in terms of tag implementations
var LookupTable = HtmlRenderer.DefaultLookupTable.ToList();
LookupTable.Add(new KeyValuePair<string,HtmlRendererCallback>("name", RenderName));
string Html = document.Children.ToHtml(false, LookupTable);
And we're done! Obviously, using this advanced method is a little bit more complex than using the extension method in the bbsharp.Easy namespace, but it gives us an idea of some of the power afforded to us by the bbsharp Library.
That's it for the Getting Started guide. Feel free to poke around the source code or Intellisense documentation if you have any queries. If you encounter any bugs or issues, please open up a ticket in the Issues section. Thanks for using bbsharp!