Comments on: Apple’s iCal and iCal/vCal format

By: Mark J. Reeves

Mark J. Reeves — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:29:00 +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.

By: sony ericsson softwares

sony ericsson softwares — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:00:00 +0000

very nice and informative post… thanks for sharing.

By: Mark Treveil

Mark Treveil — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:58:56 +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

By: David Crow

David Crow — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 23:43:19 +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.

By: David Crow

David Crow — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 16:43:00 +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.

By: George Paci

George Paci — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:07:57 +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.

By: George Paci

George Paci — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:07:00 +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.

By: David Crow

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

It looks like the error is with the iCal parser and the extra space after each

END:VEVENT

as Olivier suggests. I wish that iCal was a little more liberal in parsing. This seems to be a common debate for RDF, RSS and Atom feed parsing.

By: David Crow

David Crow — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 07:14:00 +0000

It looks like the error is with the http://www.apple.com/ical/" target="_blank">iCal parser and the extra space after each <pre>END:VEVENT </pre> as Olivier suggests. I wish that http://www.apple.com/ical/" target="_blank">iCal was a little more liberal in parsing. This seems to be a common debate for http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law" target="_blank">RDF, http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/postelsLaw" target="_blank">RSS and http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/11/PostelPilgrim" target="_blank">Atom http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=2604" target="_blank">feed parsing.

By: bex

bex — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 18:11:07 +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.