ICal

The iCalendar (.ics) calendars located at NSW Public Schools School calendar cannot be directly imported into iCal, although iCal will try. It reports the calendars as unreadable. It appears that the generating application is not following the rfc2445 specification. It is ending the files with several lines: a mix of spaces and tabs.

Using iCal 2.05, Mac OS X- 10.4 (Tiger), the calendars as composed are not readable due to many trailing spaces. There is a simple workaround.

• Click On the calendar download icon at the site. The file will be downloaded to you desktop.
• Ignore the message (although it is accurate). Click OK.
• Rename the file downloaded on the desktop (it's got a horrible UID based name) to eg. <Term1.ics>
• Open the file using TextEdit. Drag it over the TextEdit icon on the Dock and drop.
• Carefully remove ALL blank spaces from the file after the last printed line. It is <END:VCALENDAR>. Make sure there are no spaces after the last character 'R'.
• Save the file again.
• Double-Click the file icon.

The file will now behave normally and allow you to insert the information into any one of your existing iCal calendars.

This situation may also apply to other calendars that you come across. This issue in text files is more common that you might expect. When parsing, if the parsing algorithm is not fault tolerant- and few are!, then you get sync issues.

It is good practice to never insert trailing spaces in text files- not even accidentally.