Every once in a while, I want to reply to a forum post part by part. For the common BBCode forums, doing this manually is a tedious matter of repeatedly typing and/or copy-and-pasting [QUOTE] and [/QUOTE] tags. An obvious candidate for automation.

I figured the best vehicle for this piece of magic would be a bookmarklet.

I can initiate a quoted reply, put "-snip-" or "-s-" wherever I want a word in, and then run the bookmarklet. It will insert the appropriate start and end tags, including any attributes to the start tag (e.g. [QUOTE="Squid"] or [QUOTE from="Squid"]), newlines to make room for my reply (after first removing superfluous whitespace around the snip point), and then put the caret in the first such slot.

So

[QUOTE="Squid"]
Blubb blubb!
-s-
Boink boink?
-s-
Hrull...
[/QUOTE]

becomes

[QUOTE="Squid"]
Blubb blubb!
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE="Squid"]
Boink boink?
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE="Squid"]
Hrull...
[/QUOTE]

with the caret automagically placed after the first quotation.

I have the Firefox bookmark keyword "quote" tied to the bookmarklet, meaning I can type that in the address bar and hit ↩ to run it.

Right-click this link and bookmark it: Break up BBCode quote.

Formatted for readability:

(function(){
  ta = document.getElementsByTagName("textarea")[0];
  with (ta) {
    q = value.match(/\[QUOTE(.*?)\]/i)[0];
    value = value.replace(/-s(nip)?-/g, "[/QUOTE]\n\n"+q);
    offset = value.indexOf("[/QUOTE]")+9;
    focus();
    setSelectionRange(offset,offset);
  }
})();

This code makes the (rather safe, I think) assumption that you only care about the first textarea on the page. Modify to taste.

setSelectionRange() – to move the caret – is Gecko (Firefox) specific, so some modifications are necessary if you want to use this with some other browser.