How to ?

We got some recurrent/interesting questions on GitHub and by email [1]. Here are some answers that might be interesting to others.

Is there a way to export to format X ?

ics.py does not support exporting data to any other file format than the one specified in the rfc5545 and this is not expected to change.

Nevertheless, you might want to have a look at the rfc7265 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7265 that describes a 1 to 1 conversion between the iCalendar format and a JSON format.

You might want to take a look at this implementation https://github.com/mozilla-comm/ical.js/wiki Please contact us if you know other good quality implementations of converters between iCalendar and jCalendar

There is also no straightforward to export your data to a tabular format (let’s say something like CSV or a Pandas DataFrame) because the iCalendar is hierarchical by design: a VCALENDAR has multiple VTODO and VEVENT and a VEVENT contains multiple VALARM and so on.

ics.py does not support the property Y, i’m stuck

Please take a look at this section.

Known bugs

Issues with all-day events

The semantics of all-day events in the pyton API were badly defined in the early versions of ics.py and this led to incoherence and bugs. See this GitHub thread for more info.

Datetimes are converted to UTC at parsing time

ics.py always uses UTC for internal representation of dates. This is wrong and leads to many problems. See this GitHub thread for more info.

Footnotes

[1]

Please don’t send us questions by email, GitHub is much more suited for questions

[2]

An exception to this rule is already made with VALARM. ics.py already any type of ACTION while the rfc only accepts a fixed set.

[3]

Known errors are Apple iCloud omitting PRODID and badly other client outputting formatted line splits.