[PATCH] Resolve regexp ambiguity for item headers

[Mats Kindahl <mats.kindahl@oracle.com>]

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Hi!

I use org-mode quite a lot of most things and also have a number of
"workflows" in my setup, use columnview quite a lot, and also have the
habit of entering whatever text I need to write to resolve an issue
under the item in org-mode format (quite convenient, then I can just
export the subtree and send it as mail).

I have frequently run up against the issue that when trying to generate
a column view for a file, it aborts with a strange error. Since this has
become more frequent lately, I decided to resolve it.

It turns out that if you have something that looks like this:

    * Top level

    ** TODO something

    *** Proposal

    Blabla

    *** Submitted

    Some more blaha.

and you have "SUBMITTED" as one of your todo keywords, this line will be
interpreted as an item with a keyword but no headline. Since a lot of
code assumes that there is always a headline, many functions can get a
"nil" as a headline, failing miserably.

I solved this issue by requiring that there should always be a headline
text (this is after all an assumption made in the code) and rewrote the
org-complex-heading-regexp accordingly.

Patch is attached.

Just my few cents,
Mats Kindahl

-- 
Senior Principal Software Developer
Oracle, MySQL Department


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From bc3c021d06bb6f0b5971959f769216defae200bd Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Mats Kindahl <mats.kindahl@oracle.com>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2012 21:53:45 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Resolved regexp ambiguity for item headers
X-IMAPbase: 1347255850 2
Status: O
X-UID: 1

* lisp/org.el (org-complex-heading-regexp): Resolve ambiguity in heading regexp
in favor of keywordless headline

When a simple headline is provided that just contain a todo keyword, the
regular expression will match so that the heading is treated as containing just
a keyword and no headline. Since org-column-compact-links only accept a
headline text (and not nil), this causes problems with called from
org-columns-cleanup-item. This occurs if a 'columnview' dynamic block is used
to capture a column view.

This patch solves the problem by re-writing the org-complex-heading-regexp to
require a headline text instead of allowing it to be optional. This means that
items containing only a single word that also happens to be a todo keyword is
interpreted as a headline with no todo keyword and just a headline text.
---
 lisp/org.el |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/lisp/org.el b/lisp/org.el
index fef7597..e990f49 100644
--- a/lisp/org.el
+++ b/lisp/org.el
@@ -4824,7 +4824,7 @@ but the stars and the body are.")
 	    (concat "^\\(\\*+\\)"
 		    "\\(?: +" org-todo-regexp "\\)?"
 		    "\\(?: +\\(\\[#.\\]\\)\\)?"
-		    "\\(?: +\\(.*?\\)\\)?"
+		    " +\\(.+?\\)"
 		    (org-re "\\(?:[ \t]+\\(:[[:alnum:]_@#%:]+:\\)\\)?")
 		    "[ \t]*$")
 	    org-complex-heading-regexp-format
-- 
1.7.9.5