What is BBCode?

What it can hold

BBCode is a markup language, and the important consequence is that it is a one-way trip: Table tags are not part of standard BBCode, so whether they render depends on the forum software. Keep whatever you converted from, because reading the table back out of BBCode is a much harder job than writing it.

It cannot express

• Types. Every value is text. A column of digits is indistinguishable from a column of numbers until something downstream decides to read it as one, which is where a leading zero usually disappears.
• A null. An absent value and an empty one look the same, and nothing in the file says which was meant.
• Nesting. Cells are flat, so structured values have to be flattened into extra columns or written into one cell as text.
• A line break inside a cell. One would end the row, so it has to be replaced before writing.
• A partial read. The document has to be complete to mean anything, so a truncated file yields nothing and a large one has to be held in memory whole.