custom vb BB codes

[CarCdr]

Originally Posted by trican

would that not be fairly straight forward, just send the post to function, which parses it looking for keywords, and then replacing the keyword with A BBCODE for different colours?

You think it would be easy to "hang it off" vb?

Writing a language parser is non-trivial. I have written a couple from scratch and, more frequently, used lexical/parser tools to define a language parser to do the job.

It is not as simple as looking for keywords. If you did that, you would incorrectly highlight keywords within strings, as in:

$variable = "foreach $string } ?> ";

You must be able to break the input into a syntactically correct stream of tokens, then parse the tokens into a semantically correct series of language constructs, such as statements and expressions.