Format WhatsApp messages with bold, italic, strikethrough and code — live preview with chat bubble
Built & maintained by Pappu Venkata Subbi Reddy, founder of Clacify · Updated August 2026
WhatsApp Message Formatter lets you write a message with bold, italic, strikethrough, monospace, or code-block formatting and see exactly how it will render in a WhatsApp chat bubble before you send it — because WhatsApp uses plain-text markup symbols (asterisks, underscores, tildes, backticks) rather than a rich-text editor, and it's easy to get the symbols wrong or forget which one does what. Type or click the toolbar to wrap your selected text, and a live preview panel renders it inside a WhatsApp-style chat bubble, background pattern included, so you can confirm the formatting before pasting the final text into an actual conversation. A few ready-made message templates (greeting, order confirmation, thank-you note) are included for anyone using this to draft business or customer-support messages.
WhatsApp renders a small set of plain-text markup symbols as formatting, and this tool replicates that exact syntax: a single asterisk pair (*text*) renders bold, a single underscore pair (_text_) renders italic, a single tilde pair (~text~) renders strikethrough, a single backtick pair (`text`) renders inline monospace, and a triple-backtick pair (```text```) renders a multi-line monospace code block. The toolbar buttons insert these exact symbol pairs around your current text selection (or a placeholder "text" if nothing is selected). The preview panel converts the same markup to real HTML — bold, italic, strikethrough and code tags — and renders it inside a styled chat-bubble mockup so what you see is a close visual approximation of the real WhatsApp app. Copying grabs the raw markup text (asterisks and all), not the rendered HTML, since that's what WhatsApp itself expects you to paste in.
| Symbol | Result | Example you type | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| *text* | Bold | *Confirmed!* | 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐝! |
| _text_ | Italic | _delivery in 3 days_ | delivery in 3 days (italic) |
| ~text~ | Strikethrough | ~old price ₹999~ | old price ₹999 (struck through) |
| `text` | Monospace | `ORDER123` | ORDER123 (fixed-width font) |
| ```text``` | Code block | ```npm install``` | npm install (block, fixed-width) |
This syntax is identical across WhatsApp on Android, iOS, and WhatsApp Web — a message formatted this way looks the same regardless of which app the recipient is using.
WhatsApp lets you nest these markers, so wrapping already-italic text in asterisks — *_like this_* — renders as bold italic. This tool's toolbar wraps one format at a time, so to combine two, apply the first, then select the already-wrapped text and apply the second on top of it. It's a small trick, but it's the difference between plain emphasis and a message that reads as genuinely styled.
The symbols are superficially similar to Markdown, but the behaviour differs in ways that trip people up — WhatsApp has no heading syntax, no bullet-list syntax, no links syntax, and critically, double asterisks (**text**) do nothing special; only a single pair of asterisks triggers bold. Typing Markdown habits into a WhatsApp message (like using **bold** or a # heading) will just show the literal symbols in the message instead of formatting it. This tool sticks to the exact symbols WhatsApp itself recognises, so anything the preview shows as formatted will actually format the same way once sent.
Bold and italic are commonly used by shops and support teams on WhatsApp Business to make order numbers, prices, and deadlines stand out in an otherwise plain-text medium, and code blocks are a clean way to send anything the recipient needs to copy exactly — an OTP, a tracking number, a command. Because the formatting is plain text, it also survives being forwarded or copy-pasted into another app, unlike rich-text formatting from a word processor.
Wrap the text with asterisks: *bold text*. For italic: _italic text_. For strikethrough: ~strikethrough~. For monospace (code font): ```text```. For a bulleted list, start lines with a dash (-) or asterisk (*). These formatting codes work in WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone.
Yes. WhatsApp formatting (*bold*, _italic_, ~strikethrough~, ```code```) works in all WhatsApp contexts: individual chats, group messages, WhatsApp Status updates, and broadcast messages. It also works in WhatsApp Business. Compose your formatted message in Clacify's WhatsApp Formatter, copy it, and paste it into WhatsApp.