title: TextReference
tags: docs concepts

A TextReference identifies a chunk of text from a tiddler that can be retrieved or modified depending on the context.

TextReferences are made up of several parts, most of which can be optional:

* `<tiddler title>` - the text field of the specified tiddler
* `<tiddler title>!!<metadata field>` - a tiddler metadata field (eg, `modified`, `modifier`, `type` etc)
* `!!<metadata field>` - a metadata field of the current tiddler
* `<tiddler title>##<property index>` - extracts a named property from DataTiddlers