Forum trick for showing format codes

A little forum geekery. Here's a way to demonstrate forum code for those who need it. Just use the [plain] open and close tags. In the past when trying to explain the format of a particular code, I've put spaces in the tags to prevent the tag from formatting. It works for displaying it but the tag is incorrect if someone wanted to just copy and paste the code, so I would have to explain to them that they have to leave the spaces out. The [plain] tag avoids having to do that.

So what's a tag? In the editor, when you click any of the formatting icons, the forum software inserts tags: open tags (begin formatting) and close tags (end formatting). It's a code that tells the forum software what to do with the text between the tags. Close tags look like open tags but they have a / in the tag. For example, an image open and close tag looks like this:
[img]http://www.somepictureurl.com/picture.jpg[/img]

Bold tags will cause the text between the tags to be bolded.
[b]This text will bold[/b] will look like this when the forum processes the code This text will be bold.
You can see the formatting tags of your post by clicking the icon in the upper right corner of the editor (I use the icon to troubleshoot posts that don't display correctly like the infamous image problem).

For any formatting (e.g. color, left-right-justify, lists), there are tags that surround the text being formatted.

So to show someone how to embed a photo I would surround the tags with the noparse open and close tag and it would look like this to them:

[img]http://www.tradebit.com/usr/motorshop/pub/9002/toyota-tacoma-1996.jpg[/img]

Without the noparse tag, it just shows up as a picture:



The advantage of knowing tags is you can create things the icons can't. For example a list within another list.

• bullet 1
• bullet 2 with another list embedded
  • bullet 2a
  • bullet 2b
• bullet 3

Or a clickable url picture (clicking the picture takes you to the website in the URL tag):
[url=http://www.tradebit.com/usr/motorshop/pub/9002/toyota-tacoma-1996.jpg][img]http://www.tradebit.com/usr/motorshop/pub/9002/toyota-tacoma-1996.jpg[/img][/url]