NAME

ical2ics_la.pl - convert Sanjay Ghemawat's ical calendar files to IETF .ics (iCAL)


SYNOPSIS

    ical2ics_la.pl [-d STRING] [-m mergefile] [infile] [outfile]


DESCRIPTION

This little script tries to convert ical calender files produced by Sanjay Ghemawat's ical to the iCAL (aka .ics aka iCalendar as defined by RFC-2445) format which can be read by GNOME Evolution or other compatible programs.

By default the program reads standard input and writes to standard output.

This program is based on a version by Florian Schaefer (thanks!) to convert from read-ical's ical files to Mozilla's Calendar, two different variants of these input and output formats. Changes to support ical and Evolution may have caused regressions for those programs (I cannot test them).

The earlier version of this program had known problems with recurring events. This version has much better recurrent event handling and works for nearly all of the cases I found in my 15 years of ical, including weekly, bi-weekly, multi-day weekly, monthly, Nth Monday of the month, and annual recurring events, with exceptions. Whew.

This version also will die when it finds things it doesn't know how to convert, allowing you to know what it doesn't. The experienced user (and are there any ical users left for whom that doesn't apply?) will then correct the code or at least comment out the die statement to allow things to continue.

In addition to this testier error handling, this version fixes some bugs and many warnings. Hopefully the new bugs do not outweigh those removed.


OPTIONS

-d STRING

Change default description to STRING

-m MERGEFILENAME

Merge the outfile with mergefile (the syntax has to be similar to the one created by this script), may be the outfile itself.

-v

Enable verbose output.

--help

Show help.

--man

Show full manual.

The original program requested: please report bugs or send comments to florian\@netego.de.

INSTALLATION AND RELEASE

Releases of the extended version, such as there may be, can be found at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/ICAL/.

Florian's original version is at http://www.netego.de/hpc?p=download&l=en and http://www.netego.de/download/ical2ics.pl.

COPYRIGHT AND AUTHOR

Original author: Florian Schaefer florian@netego.de, April 2002.

Original copyright: Feel free to distribute this file under the terms of the GPL.

Extensions in ical2ics_la.pl by John Heidemann johnh@isi.edu. I added "la" (for Los Angeles) to decrease confusion about what version is what. The extended version is released with Florian's blessing (thanks!).

Current copyright (a more explicit version of the original copyright):

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.


This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.