WhatsApp message formatter

Four Characters, and No Toolbar Anywhere

WhatsApp has no bold button. It has no italic button, no font menu, no colours and no headings. What it has is four characters that you type around your own words, and a set of rules about when they count that nobody has ever read. The WhatsApp message formatter above puts your message on the left and the bubble your customer receives on the right, so you find out which of your markers took effect before you send it rather than afterwards.

That is the entire job. The right hand side is not an impression of a WhatsApp message. It is your text run through the same rules, so a marker that is going to fail fails here first, where it costs you nothing.

What the WhatsApp Message Formatter Shows You

Two panels side by side, and they are showing you two different things on purpose.

The left one is the source: your message with the markers still in it, exactly the characters you will paste into WhatsApp. The right one is an outgoing bubble in WhatsApp’s green, with a timestamp and a pair of blue ticks, holding the same message with the markers taken out and the styling applied.

The panel opens on a worked example rather than an empty box, because an empty box teaches nothing. It reads as a salon message about two cancellations, and it deliberately uses all four markers at once: a bold headline, two italic times, a struck out old price beside the new one, and a booking code in monospace.

Clear the box entirely and the bubble tells you what it is waiting for instead of sitting there as an empty green rectangle.

The Four Markers, and What Each One Is Actually For

The row of buttons above the message box is the whole vocabulary.

• Bold, with asterisks. *Like this*. One thing per message. Bold is a spotlight, and a message with four bold phrases in it has no spotlight at all.
• Italic, with underscores. _Like this_. Good for a time, a date, a name, an aside. It reads as a change of voice rather than a raised one.
• Strikethrough, with tildes. ~Like this~. It has one genuinely great use, which is an old price beside a new one, and the reason it works is that the reader does the arithmetic themselves.
• Monospace, with three backticks. Every character the same width, which makes a booking code, a reference number or a door code look like something to be typed rather than read.

There is nothing else. No underline, no font size, no colour, no headings and no way to centre anything. If a message needs more than these four to be understood, the message is too long.

Select, Then Tap

You can type the markers by hand, and the note under the box shows you the shape of each one. The buttons are faster.

Highlight a phrase, tap a style, and the pair of markers goes around it. The phrase stays highlighted afterwards, which is deliberate: tap a second style straight away and it wraps the same words again, so a phrase can be bold and italic at once and it arrives as one run of text carrying both.

Tap a style with nothing selected and you get an empty pair with the cursor sitting between them, ready for you to type inside it. That is the quicker way to start a bold line than typing an asterisk, forgetting, and coming back for it.

The Rules That Decide Whether a Marker Works

This is the part that catches people, and it is why a preview is worth the thirty seconds.

A marker only counts as an opener if there is a real character immediately after it. A marker only counts as a closer if there is content in front of it and the character just before it is not a space. And an opener with nothing to close it is not a marker at all: it stays on screen as an ordinary asterisk.

Those three rules explain almost every surprise.

• 2 * 3 * 4 arrives unformatted. Every asterisk has a space after it, so none of them opens anything. This is the rule that lets prices, measurements and sums survive a chat unharmed.
• * Bold heading does not go bold. There is a space after the asterisk. Close the gap and it works.
• An underscore in a file name or a handle stays put. One underscore with no partner is just an underscore.
• *Half a sentence stays literal. Nothing closes it, so nothing happens, and you have sent a customer a stray asterisk.

The bubble on the right applies exactly these rules, which is what makes it worth reading rather than glancing at.

The Backtick Fence Is a Different Animal

Three backticks do not behave like the other three markers, and the difference is useful.

They are a fence rather than a pair. Everything between an opening run of three and a closing run of three is taken whole, which means it can hold line breaks, and nothing inside it is formatted at all. An asterisk sitting inside a monospace block is an asterisk, and it cannot reach out and close a bold run that started before the fence.

That makes the fence the right tool for anything a customer has to copy exactly. A discount code, an order reference, a bank reference, a meter reading, a Wi-Fi password. It also gives you a way to send a genuine asterisk without a fight: put it inside a fence and it stays an asterisk.

Open a fence and never close it and the backticks show up as backticks, the same as any other unmatched marker.

The Character Count Includes the Markers

The number under the message box counts the source, not the bubble. Every asterisk, every underscore, every backtick is in that total.

That is the honest way to count it, because the markers travel with the message. They are characters you are sending. A heavily formatted message is a longer message than it looks in the preview, and anything downstream that counts characters will count the markers too.

Emoji count as one each here, which is how a person counts them and not always how software does. If you are working to a limit somewhere else, that difference is worth knowing about before you trust a number.

For messages going out over SMS rather than WhatsApp, none of this applies and the counting is a different problem entirely: the SMS length calculator deals with encoding and segments, which is where an SMS bill actually comes from.

What the Copy Button Copies

The source, with the markers still in it. Never the bubble.

It is worth saying plainly because the bubble is the thing you have been looking at, and it is the wrong thing to copy. The markers are the message. Paste the formatted-looking version anywhere and you get plain text with the styling stripped out, because the styling was never in the text: it was the receiving app reading your asterisks.

So the working order through the WhatsApp message formatter is: write on the left, check on the right, copy from the button, paste into whatever actually sends.

What the WhatsApp Message Formatter Will Not Do

It is a preview with a clipboard attached, and it is worth being clear about the edges.

• It does not send anything. No number field, no login, no connection to WhatsApp of any kind.
• Nothing is stored. Reload the page and your message is gone. There is no account and no history.
• It previews these four markers only. Anything else you type is shown as plain text here, so treat any other syntax as unchecked rather than as broken.
• It knows nothing about templates. If the message is destined for a template that has to be approved, this panel has no view of that. It checks how your text renders, not whether it is allowed.
• The ticks and the timestamp are scenery. Two blue ticks and a time in the corner make the bubble look like a real one. They are not a delivery report and not a send time.
• It cannot see the receiving phone. The bubble is a faithful reading of the rules, not a photograph of somebody’s screen.

Every part of the panel is built on the server before any script runs, which is why the bubble is already parsed and correct the moment the page appears. Typing only reparses it.

Before It Goes to Five Thousand People

Formatting mistakes are cheap in a one to one chat and expensive in a broadcast, because the same stray asterisk arrives five thousand times and you cannot take it back.

Three habits worth having.

• Read the bubble, not the box. The box is where you write. The bubble is what happens. It is very easy to proofread the source and never look at the result.
• Send it to yourself first. One message, to your own number, on the phone you will be reading replies on. It takes a minute and it catches the things a preview cannot: how it looks on a small screen, where the line breaks fall, whether the whole thing needs a tap to expand.
• Count the bold. If more than one phrase is bold, decide which one you actually want read first and unbold the rest.

If the message is going out to a list rather than to one person, work out what it costs before you write it. The broadcast cost calculator prices a single campaign to your whole list, and the WhatsApp marketing ROI calculator puts the return beside it.

Formatting Is Not the Message

A bold line does not make an offer good. It makes a good offer easier to find, and it makes a bad offer slightly more annoying.

The message that gets replies is the one that says a specific thing to a specific person: a slot on a named day, a price against an old price, one question they can answer with a word. Formatting is how you stop that getting lost in a paragraph, and it is nothing more than that.

When you are ready to send it to more than one person, that becomes a different job. With DMly a broadcast reuses your approved templates and picks who receives it by service, spend or last visit, so the message you spent ten minutes formatting goes to the people it was actually written for. Getting the wording right first is what makes that worth doing at all.