[Workaround] Escaping false list items

[Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com>]

Hi,

Back to the problem with e.g. "2011. " being interpreted as a list 
item when it happens to be at the beginning of a line:

After a bad experience with a document that had a lot of those, I came 
up with this function to easily escape false list items. Maybe some of 
you will find it helpful, or better yet, have suggestions for 
improvements.


(defun my/org-list-escape-nonitems ()
   (interactive)
   (let ((nonitem "[0-9]\\{4\\}") ; Unlikely list numbers
				 ; here: four-digit numbers (years)
	(term (cond
                ((eq org-plain-list-ordered-item-terminator t) "[.)]")
                ((= org-plain-list-ordered-item-terminator ?\)) ")")
                ((= org-plain-list-ordered-item-terminator ?.) "\\.")
                (t "[.)]"))))
     (goto-char (point-min))
     (query-replace-regexp
      (concat "^\\(" nonitem "\\)\\(" term "\\) ")
      (concat "\\1\\2" (string ?\240)))))


It calls query-replace-regexp, so the user can confirm each 
replacement interactively, on apparent list items where the numbering 
matches the NONITEM regexp. If confirmed, it replaces the space after 
the item terminator with a non-breaking space.

In the code above, NONITEM is simply hard-coded as four digits, 
matching years. It could be made a customizable variable.

The adventurous might want to call it automatically before export, 
though currently this does not work well with subtree exports:

   (add-hook 'org-export-first-hook 'my/org-list-escape-nonitems)

Feedback welcome.

Yours,
Christian