Re: [O] Bug: org-mode interprets * as a headline in text between #+BEGIN_.. and #+END_...

[John Hendy]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 3:28 PM, David Talmage
<address@hidden> wrote:
> I often paste verbatim text into the lab notebook I keep with org-mode.
> Org-mode always interprets any line that begins with an asterisk as a
> headline, even when the line is surrounded by #+BEGIN_... and #+END_...
> patterns. This breaks org-special-edit, making it complain, "No special
> environment to edit here", unless I manually insert another character at the
> beginning of every line in the block that begins with an asterisk.
>
> The behavior surprised me.  I found two ways to work around it.  First, I
> can edit the would-be verbatim text as described above. It will always look
> like the original text in org-special-edit. That's marginally acceptable
> because it alters my original text and makes me take one more step before I
> can copy and paste it elsewhere.  Second, I can put such text in a drawer.
> I discovered that org-mode does not mis-interpret my text in a drawer.
>
>

I don't have a good explanation of why, but I know you need a comma to
escape org syntax, even within src blocks:
- mention of it in the manual (footnote 4):
http://orgmode.org/manual/Literal-examples.html
- SO answer: 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7431167/escaping-org-mode-example-block-inside-of-an-example-block

> Here is an example.  It's markdown text.  I use #+{BEGIN,END}_EXAMPLE but
> this behavior occurs in all of the #+BEGIN_.. and #+END_... patterns.
>
> #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
> This is the README.md for rfc-tools, a collection of programs for
> processing IETF RFCs.
>
> * fetch-rfcs-by-title.sh downloads into the current directory the RFCs
>    whose titles contain the string given on the command line.  Uses an
>   rfc-index file in the current directory.  Prefers the PDF version of
>   RFCs but will obtain the text version if the PDF is not available.
>
> * fetch-sip-rfcs.sh downloads RFCs that contain "Session Initiation"
>   in their titles into the current directory.
>
> * search-rfc-index.sh searches an rfc-index file in the current
>   directory for the string given on the command line.  The string can
>   contain spaces.
>
> * join-titles.awk turns the contents of an rfc-index file into a
>   series of long lines.  Each line begins with the RFC number, then a
>   space, then the rest of the entry from the rfc-index.
> #+END_EXAMPLE
>