Re: [O] [BUG] org-sort-entries errors out when headline is empty

[Sebastian Reuße]

Hello Nicolas,

Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> writes:

> Sebastian Reuße <address@hidden> writes:

>> I was also wondering if it might make sense to tweak
>> ‘org-complex-heading-regexp’ so that the respective capture group
>> captures an empty string. This could be achieved by making the title
>> group greedy again (reverting 9d334897e). Whether we want this
>> probably depends on the motivation for 9d334897e. However, doing so
>> would be more consistent with the org-elements API, which does assign
>> a tag list to the title property when the heading is otherwise empty.

> How should we treat the following:
>
>   * :something:
>
> Is it an empty headline with a "something" tag, or a ":something:"
> headline with no tag? All things being equal, it doesn't matter much,
> whichever answer is chosen, we can get the other one with a zero-width
> space or some such.

As for my 5 cents on the (probably not too consequential) design issue:
I’d probably choose to treat this as an empty headline with tags. Due to
the special syntax, tags are “more special” than headlines, and my
expectation would be that most folks would find it consistent to treat
them as tags in this case as well. In practical terms, a heading
enclosed in colons is probably a rarer thing to wind up with in an org
file than an empty heading with tags. But that’s just IMHO.

I agree it would be great if this were treated consistently all over
the codebase.

Kind regards,
SR

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