David Crow - Latest Comments in Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Mark J. Reeves — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:29:44 -0000

I suspect if you remove "VERSION:2.0" it will work in iCal, but won't have full Outlook support. I've wrestled with this today, and in the past, with vcs files generated on web servers.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

sony ericsson softwares — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 07:00:42 -0000

very nice and informative post... thanks for sharing.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Mark Treveil — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:58:56 -0000

One observation: you have dates with both a time zone AND ending in a "Z". I think you;ll find that "Z" means UTC, so you can't use this with a TimeZone

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

davidcrow — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:43:19 -0000

George, you hit it on the head, iCal is really picky about the extra spaces in the code. I had to make sure to trim any extra white spaces.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

George Paci — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 10:07:57 -0000

Warning: horribly off-topic 
 
Sorry, but I couldn't find your email anywhere. This is in response to your July 6, 2004 posting about problems with iCal. 
 
I noticed that your vCalendar text, as it appeared on the site, had trailing spaces on some begin/end lines. When I fed it to iCal, it didn't like that at all, and essentially ignored all events that had the problem. 
 
This pickiness may be the entire problem. Please let me know if this was helpful.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

David Crow — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:14:43 -0000

It looks like the error is with the <a href="http://www.apple.com/ical/" target="_blank">iCal</a> parser and the extra space after each <pre>END:VEVENT </pre> as Olivier suggests. I wish that <a href="http://www.apple.com/ical/" target="_blank">iCal</a> was a little more liberal in parsing. This seems to be a common debate for <a href="http://diveintomark.org/arc..." target="_blank">RDF</a>, <a href="http://essaysfromexodus.scr..." target="_blank">RSS</a> and <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoin..." target="_blank">Atom</a> <a href="http://inessential.com/?com..." target="_blank">feed parsing</a>.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

bex — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:11:07 -0000

Actually I found the error. The ics files are autogenerated by perl code that parses the pub 509 html from the IRS. There is one entry that is irregular and was resulting in a date of 20040000. This caused the entire month of January to be unhappy, only in Month display mode. All other months and display modes were ok. I corrected it and the world is good! 
 
As an aside: Does anyone find this idea useful? 
 
An intermediary that sits between your ical and a subscribed calendar and edits it. Here are three examples uses that I have come up with (I don't do all of these personally): 
 
1 - Eliminate certain holidays in a calendar (i.e. eliminate Labor Day from the US Holidays calendar because I must labor on that day. Or, eliminate certain holidays from a religious calendar because I don't celebrate them. 
 
2 - Eliminate all "away" games from a sports calendar because I only care about the team enough to follow them at home (or I just want a calendar of season ticket opps). 
 
3 - In the case of my Tax calendars, one of them provides info on both Payroll and Nonpayroll based withholdings. I only care about payroll based withholdings, so I scrub the others out. 
 
I have this running personally, and am not sure whether I should clean up for release. 
 
comments? 
 
PS: To David Crow: I apologize for hijacking your comments section of your blog like this. Please delete this post with my apologies if it is inappropriate. While I am a very seasoned internet user, I really do not follow the blog scene and so I am less aware of the netiquette.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Olivier Gutknecht — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 03:30:48 -0000

Do you have any online example of such a faulty calendar file, bex ? The iCalendar RFC is quite complex, and it's easy to make a minor mistake.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

bex — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:41:54 -0000

I have run into a similar problem. Some homebrew ics files appear to display all events except those occurring in January 2004 in iCal. Oddly, they prevent all calendar's events from showing in that month. If you drill down to the day or week view, the events are there (they are all all-day events). If you deselect this calendar, then the other calendar's events will reappear. But only until you deselect/select them. 
 
I can find nothing different about the way I generated the January versus the other month events. Have you found out more about this problem on your end? 
 
danke

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

David Crow — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:43:38 -0000

I could have sworn that NAME: was part of the spec. Thanks Tim, you are correct that it is not in there at all. 
 
I'll expose the .ics tonight. It is running on a development server which is behind the firewall. Either I'll promote to test, or just copy the file up.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Tim — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:15:42 -0000

I've posted a draft (note: version 00 so there will be some typos) on some guidelines for XML and iCalendar use.. this is an individual draft, but if you decide to look into XML and iCal I'd like to hear your opinions. 
 
<a href="http://www.ietf.org/interne... />
" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.ietf.org/interne..." target="_blank">http://www.ietf.org/interne... 
One thing I saw in your file that isn't in the standard (RFC2445) is the NAME: property of VCALENDAR. Not sure if that causes a problem in iCal but it definitely seems non-stanard-compliant

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Olivier Gutknecht — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 06:18:37 -0000

It basically works for me in iCal 1.5.2 too (at least for two events). For the three others, there are some problems in the ICS pasted here, that is some of the "BEGIN:EVENT" / "END:EVENT" like do have an extra space after the EVENT string, which is sufficient to have them not recognized as a VEVENT component (the iCal parser seems to be ultra-strict here). This can be also due to a problem when pasting the ics content here, an URL to the actual file would be necessary to have a definitive advice on that.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Libby Miller — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:47:35 -0000

Interesting - it works for me with ical 1.5.2 v637.

Re: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

Matthias Cavigelli — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:57:42 -0000

Maybe these two links will help you. I think it's a quite known problem. 
 
<a href="http://groups.google.com/gr... />
" target="_blank"><a href="http://groups.google.com/gr..." target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/gr... 
<a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org... " target="_blank"><a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org..." target="_blank">http://bugzilla.mozilla.org... </a>