Linux @lemmy.ml flyos @jlai.lu 10 mo. ago

A tool to filter and reorganise iCalendar (ICS) files?

Hi,

I would like to reorganise a big calendar into several smaller ones, e.g. based on the categories of events (say categories "Birthday" would be moved to a "Birthday" calendar and so on). I know it could some up with some highly convoluted awk script to filter the very unfriendly ICS format, but I thought I could simplify my life and use the work of some nice person who certainly had come up with a tool to manipulate ICS files (GUI or CLI), right?

It turns out, I can find many small scripts or Github repos named "icsfilter" or the like, but nothing seemingly quite established.

That's why I turn to this great community: anybody who was confronted to the same problem and could recommend a nice utility to filter ICS files?

Thanks a lot!

2 comments

I think it should be fairly trivial to do with Python and a calendar library, you'd just have to go through the input entries, keep the ones with the properties you like and dump those to the output.

I'm not well versed in Python either but I had a specific calendar problem once — had to clear a calendar storage that went back years and the provider's UI didn't let you delete the base calendar — and after looking it up it was a few lines of Python.

That's probably why you don't find established tools because every person who runs into this stuff has a super specific need.
- Thanks! I found something interesting, a function named icalfilter from the ical2html package in Debian/Ubuntu. Very easy to use to filter by categories. Unfortunately, this same package does not exist for openSUSE, but worse case scenario, I can use my Debian server to work on those ICS files.