How to escape double quote?

Question

In org mode, if I want to format text a monospace verbatim, i.e. ~...~, if it is inside quotes: ~\"...\"~, it is not formatted (left as is).

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Answer 1

The culprit in this case is the regular expression in org-emph-re org-verbatim-re, responsible for determining if a sequence of characters in the document is to be set verbatim or not.

org-verbatim-re is a variable defined in `org.el'. Its value is "\([ ('\"{]\|^\)\(\([=~]\)\([^
\n,\"']\|[^
\n,\"'].?\(?:\n.?\)\{0,1\}[^
\n,\"']\)\3\)\([- .,:!?;'\")}\]\|$\)"

quotes and double quotes are explicitly forbidden inside verbatim characters =~ by

[^ 
\n,\"']\|[^ 
\n,\"']

I found discussions dating back 3 years comming to the conclusion that you have to tinker with this regular expression and set the variable org-emph-re/org-verbatim-re to something that matches your wishes in your emacs setup (maybe a file local variable works as well). You can experiment by excluding double quotes from the excluding character classes and outside matches as in

"\([ ('{]\|^\)\(\([*/_=~+]\)\([^
\n,']\|[^
\n,'].?\(?:\n.?\)\{0,1\}[^
\n,']\)\3\)\([- .,:!?;')}\]\|$\)"

but looking at that regex, heaven knows what happens to complex documents -- you have to try...

Edit: as it happens, if I evalute the following as region, quotes inside = are exported correctly, but nothing else is :-), I investigate further when I have more time.

(setq org-emph-re "\([ ('{]\|^\)\(\([*/_=~+]\)\([^ \n,']\|[^ \n,'].?\(?:\n.?\)\{0,1\}[^ \n,']\)\3\)\([- .,:!?;')}]\|$\)")

Edit 2:: Got it to work by changing org.el directly:

Change the line following (defvar org-emphasis-regexp-components from '(" \t('\"{" "- \t.,:!?;'\")}\\" " \t\r\n,\"'" "." 1) to '(" \t('{" "- \t.,:!?;')}\\" " \t\r\n,'" "." 1) and recompile org then restart emacs.

This was a defcustom prior to the 8.0 release, it isn't anymore, so you have to live with this manual modification.

regards, Tom