How can I make time ranges for an iCal calendar from a database of entries? - macos

Question

I've got some Perl script that I'm using to scrape calendar events. I've got a database of events, and now I'd like to process these into an iCal file. I opened my university's academic iCal calendar and got the following:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-TIMEZONE;VALUE=TEXT:America/Los_Angeles
PRODID:-//MMISoftware\, //MMISoftware//EN
X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:spring14cal
X-WR-RELCALID;VALUE=TEXT:87FB4C57-1D7B-4B80-B200-AEED845CB3AF
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
SEQUENCE:1
UID:41D26C6E-965B-4BFB-AEC0-F1614074A4AF
DTSTAMP:20140127T111052Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20140101
SUMMARY:FAFSA
DESCRIPTION:First day to obtain FAFSA financial aid applications for 201
4-15 academic year online at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov
DURATION:P1D
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
SEQUENCE:1
UID:DFE257FB-F475-43C2-9AEB-569EC4BA321D
DTSTAMP:20140127T111052Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20140106
SUMMARY:CA Dream
DESCRIPTION:First day to obtain California Dream Act financial aid appli
cations for 2014-15 academic year online at https://dream.csac.ca.gov
.
.
.
.
I see a start date, end date, and a time stamp, but I don't see a range... Not sure how to use my existing database to make an iCal file---you know, metaprogramming---with time ranges like the following:
http://musformation.com/pics/thg_sync_apple_ical.jpg

Answer 1

You could use Date::ICal to format the duration strings.
The duration itself ( in your case we can see only the duration of the first event, because the duration of the second event would be the first line you skipped ) is DURATION:P1D, where P1D is the Duration itself and DURATION is the property name.
Further information about ICals Duration can be found here.
When you want to parse ICal files, you can use ICal::Parser.
Creating ICal Files can be done easily with Data::ICal. An example:
use Data::ICal;
use Data::ICal::Entry::Event;
use strict;
use warnings;
my $calendar = Data::ICal->new;
my $vtodo = Data::ICal::Entry::Event->new;
$vtodo->add_properties(
summary => "read SO",
description => "reading cool SO posts",
dtstart => Date::ICal->new(
day => 4,
month => 6,
year => 2014,
hour => 8,
min => 30,
sec => 00
)->ical,
dtend => Date::ICal->new(
day => 5,
month => 6,
year => 2014,
hour => 9,
min => 50,
sec => 00
)->ical,
);
$calendar->add_entry($vtodo);
print $calendar->as_string;