# Introduction

The Zend_Markup component provides an extensible way for parsing text and rendering lightweight markup languages like BBcode. It is available as of Zend Framework version 1.10.

Zend_Markup uses a factory method to instantiate an instance of a renderer that extends Zend_Markup_Renderer_Abstract. The factory method accepts three arguments. The first one is the parser used to tokenize the text (e.g. BbCode). The second (optional) parameter is the renderer to use, HTML by default. Thirdly an array with options to use for the renderer can be specified.