A pragma is a special component of WikiText that provides control over the way the remaining text is parsed.

Pragmas occupy lines that start with \. They can only appear at the start of the text, but blank lines are allowed between them. If a pragma line appears in the main body of the text, it is treated as if it was ordinary text. New in: 5.2.6 Pragmas can have preceding optional whitespace characters.

The following pragmas are available:

\define

for defining a macro

\rules

for adjusting the set of rules used to parse the text

\whitespace trim or \whitespace notrim

New in: 5.1.15 Control whether whitespace is trimmed from the start and end of text runs (the default is notrim). This setting can be useful when the whitespace generated by linebreaks disturbs formatting

\import <filter-expression>

New in: 5.1.18 Import macro definitions from tiddlers identified by a filter expression

\parsermode block or \parsermode inline

New in: 5.2.4 Adjust whether the remaining text is parsed in block mode or inline mode.