Re: asterisk allowed for list items

[Ihor Radchenko]

c.buhtz@posteo.jp writes:

> I cite from there
> "An asterisk, hyphen, or plus sign character (i.e., *, -, or +)."
>
> I wonder why * is allowed because * also starts a heading. So how does a 
> piece of software/parser decide if a line starting with an * is a 
> heading or a list item?

Headlines always start at beginning of line and have stars followed by space:

* this is a heading
** this is also a heading
**but this is not (no space after stars)
 * this is a list item (star not at bol)

Would you be interested to contribute an example to
https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Items ?

Best,
Ihor