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Following Org mode refiling gobbles a newline and absorbs the next heading where Org mode refiling has gobbled some of the next heading, I want to search for those gobbled headings where the stars are not preceded by newlines. I wrote this regular expression with re-builder:

[^
\\*]\\*

It shows 16 matches and I confirmed that some are relevant. But search-forward-regexp with the same expression matches every character. I suspected it was due to escaping the backslash in the re-builder literal, which uses double-quotes, and search-forward-regexp with

[^
\*]\*

works to find lone stars.

I did not see double backlashes in the manual page.

Why does this happen, and when do backslashes need to be escaped?

miguelmorin
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    Does the related Q&A https://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/5568/454 answer this for you? I suspect that you are using `search-forward-regexp` interactively, in which case your regexps need to be in `string` syntax rather than `read` syntax. – phils Nov 03 '19 at 08:57
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    Also note that within a character alternative (square brackets) `\ ` is a literal backslash, so the regexp `[^\*]\*` matches any character *except a backslash or an asterisk*, followed by an asterisk. – phils Nov 03 '19 at 09:00

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