Does Org have a mechanism for escaping its own syntax? Last time I searched, to type *this* (keeping the asterisks) you had to insert a zero-width space (U+200B). In markdown you just escape them with \*this\*.
I've used the following, in addition to the "escape character" method (which is officially documented as the other commenter noted):
For in-line escaping, I use tilde-blocks ~ ~ ... as in ~~ . This type-sets in monospace (code format) in exports, which usually* is what one wants anyway, viz. to demarcate the symbol as being symbolised.
For non-code text blocks, "Literal Example" https://orgmode.org/manual/Literal-Examples.html This also gets typeset in monospace, in exports.
For special symbols, LaTeX-like syntax https://orgmode.org/manual/Special-Symbols.html
You can keep these tricks in mind while writing, but sometimes it's not you doing the writing. It could be pasted text, it could be a machine writing.
Looks like even the documentation for org-mode recommends using zero-width spaces: https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html
I think org-mode was never primarily about its rendered output. Most users probably, like me, spend a lot of time (hours every day) in various org-mode documents, staring at what is essentially the raw mark-up. Org-mode in Emacs makes only a few minor changes to how the text is displayed, like hiding link targets, so you rarely look at the output. I export less than 1% of my org documents, so usually I don't care at all about what formatting renders like, as long as I get the mark-up correct enough that org-mode itself is functional (links can be followed, sections collapsed etc). The few documents I do want to export I can imagine using workarounds like the zero-width spaces, but it is not like there is often a need to have things looking like org-mode mark-up in the output.
For me at least, worrying about escaping mark-up would be too distracting and just add noise, as the raw mark-up is what I will read anyway. But I think some good way to escape things would not be a bad thing to have.
BTW there are verbatim blocks that can be used when you have entire lines of non-org content. And of course src-blocks. But that obviously does not handle every case escapes could be useful.
I understand your use case, I just think it makes it not worthy of comparisons to markdown.
I run into this a lot with gptel. I use a main Org file for all my daily notes, and since gptel streams LLM output as Org (which is good), it conflicts with my main file. I have a post-processing function that converts headings into `#` to avoid this, but it's a hack I'd rather not do.
The `code` equivalent in Org is ~code~. How do you type that without the Org highlighting removing the ~ from "~300 lines", thinking that the code snippet begins there? This is an example I got from grepping my org files for U+200B.
If you (setq org-pretty-entities t) below will render correctly in org buffers, and exports correctly too.
The logs come to about \tilde{}300 lines once you start the server with ~systemctl start fnord~
Here's a star: \ast
\~300 lines
The highlighting corrects for me once I "escape" the "~300".
%~300
A~300Sure, not a big pain, I just wrapped it in a function paste-from-mysql that appends the whitespace, but then I need to take out the whitespace of I want to paste that somewhere else. It would be nice to have org support some sort of 'do not interpret what comes next' block markers. I guess someone with enough time and skills could make this change but, alas, that's not me.
Now I just need to keep my paste function, but have it add a leading comma instead of a space, and I need to use example instead of src (not a problem for this use case since, even though I normally paste them into sql src blocks, the syntax highlighting isn't that useful.
You gave me a nice little task for a rainy day, thanks :)