Encoding newlines in iCal files

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to encode newlines in the DESCRIPTION part of an iCal file in such a way that they will import properly into Outlook, Google Calendar and the Apple Calendar.

The original code I inherited used "=0D=0A" with a quoted-printable encoding, which works great in Outlook, but not in Google Calendar.

The spec seems to say you should use "\n" to represent a newline. This works great in Google Calendar, but Outlook just puts the literal "\n" characters in there.

Is there a way you've done this that will work consistently accross calendaring systems?

Dutiable

The part of the iCal specification in question is: tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.11 – Teerell

Answer 1

OK, looks like I'm answering my own question.

The correct way to do it is to use "\n" for line breaks. Outlook did not recognize this because I had "ENCODING=quoted-printable" on the description. Once I removed that, Outlook displayed the new lines correctly.

Also, to get the file to open correctly in Apple iCal, you need to use "VERSION:2.0" for the file version. If you use "VERSION:1.0", it will tell you it can't read the file (even though it conforms to the 1.0 spec).

NOTE: As others have mentioned, the file actually has to contain the literal string \n. Since most languages treat that as an escape sequence meaning a newline character, you probably need to use the string \\n in your code.

Dutiable

for anyone who added \n to create new line and it still didn't work, I ended up using \\n as noted by @periklis – Kalina

Answer 2

The comment with the link to the RFC from Matthew Bucket above in the original post helped me. Quoting from there:

A BACKSLASH character in a "TEXT" property value MUST be escaped with another BACKSLASH character

So, I did a

$description = str_replace("\r\n", "\\n", $description);

and it worked

Jada

Quote and code don't seem to match. Code replaces Windows line feeds with literal \n sequences. – Susann

This is incredibly weird seeing \\n and next to impossible to comprehend properly. In .NET land I created const string textLineFeed = @"\" + "n"; – Schreiner

Your solution was the magic bullet for me. I tried all the others on this page unsuccessfully. Thank you. – Savagism

Answer 3

Might be worth saying that you need the literal \n, not the newline symbol, literally backslash then n in the ical. Also don't forget to do the 75 character "folding" too.

Fleawort

also one needs to use CRLF, but here is more about content folding – Pendant

Answer 4

Your output file should be like below---

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//2013//#Ur Site Name#//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:[event]2012
DTSTART:20130101T100000
DTEND:20130101T120000
LOCATION:
SUMMARY:#Meeting Title here#
DESCRIPTION:What is realistic for financial services companies to achieve via Social Media channels?    \n\nJoin us on 11th September 2013 at 4pm (BST) where we 
-----bla bla bla ----
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Here you have to take care of Version, it should be 2.0 and Escape char ... \n(newline), semicolon(;) and comma(,). If you are writing in .net then it should like ... "\\n", "\\;" and "\\,".

You can check your output file on this site as well... https://icalendar.org/validator.html

Thanks, Bhaskar

Brittbritta

+1 for the validator, and also mentioning the other characters that need escaping – Remand

Lines should not contain more than 75 characters: tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.1 – Spinning

The validator mentioned in the answer isn't available anymore. Here's two others, that give different results (but reasonable in both cases): icalendar.org/validator.html, ical-validator.herokuapp.com – Easterling

Answer 5

According to this RFC:

Content lines are delimited by a line break, which is a CRLF sequence (CR character followed by LF character).

So you should use \r\n. I used this in strings without additional backslash escaping.

Platoon

Answer 6

This is my answer for DESCRIPTION

$filev = str_replace("\r\n", '\\n', $p);
$filev = str_replace("<br>",'\\n',$filev);
$filev = (str_replace(";","\;",str_replace(",",'\,',$filev)));

Garnet

Answer 7

According to RFC 5545, the correct way to fold lines longer than 75 characters is to add a CRLF and a space at the end of such lines. The following Python code will do it:

import re
def word_wrap(text):
   return re.sub("(.{75})", "\\1\r\n ", text, 0, re.DOTALL)

The white space after the "\r\n" is critical! Without it, calendar applications like Apple Calendar will not correctly import the .ics file.

Ejecta

Answer 8

I had to escape the output in the string to set a literal "\n" in the output file. Like so. Worked a charm.

$events .= "DESCRIPTION:" . str_replace("\n","\\n",str_replace(";","\;",str_replace(",",'\,',get_event_contents()))) . "\n";

Lordinwaiting

Answer 9

=0D=0A works with Outlook, but you'll need to change the DESCRIPTION key, so that line breaks can be interpreted.

DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:

Enter your text after the colon, using =0D=0A for line breaks. Outlook will read the line breaks correctly. Using \\n only works if you're using DESCRIPTION without ENCODING:QUOTED-PRINTABLE.

I'm using VERSION:2.0

Pelkey