Hello,

Mats Kindahl <mats.kindahl@oracle.com> writes:

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.

Actually, I have recently committed a change going exactly the opposite
way. I'm not certain which solution is better, but I tend to think empty
headlines should be valid and parts of Org choking on empty headlines
should be fixed.

• The code I looked at assumes that the headline text is there, so it's likely that it's the common assumption.
• It is clearly the case that todo keywords are optional.
• It is not so clear that the headline text is optional

However:

• The regular expression matches completely empty headlines, so maybe the intention is to allow matching items with just a todo keyword?

I would be very interested if anybody could shed some light on this.

Best wishes,
Mats Kindahl

-- 
Senior Principal Software Developer
Oracle, MySQL Department