Re: ICS import?

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> wrote:

> I constantly get invitations from Exchange users in .ics files that I
> would love to import into Org. Currently I manually input meetings
> into my Agenda files.
> 
I share your pain.

> The format of ics files is hideous, so before I started to study the
> format and write something new I thought I'd make sure I didn't
> reinvent the wheel.
> 
I've been threatening to do something like this for years, but my efforts
have stalled repeatedly for lack of time.

> Is there a way to import ics files into Org? Especially with proper
> timezone conversions?
> 

Not that I know of.

In my last foray, I thought I would start with icalendar.el (afaik, part
of the standard emacs distribution); the trouble was that icalendar.el
was heavily biased towards, and intertwined with, the standard
calendar/diary combo. So my approach was going to be to split it into a
library part and a back end part: the library part would do the parsing,
returning a standard representation of the ics file and the back ends
(one for diary, one for org) would go from the standard rep to the
backend specific one.

Also, iirc, icalendar.el was an incomplete implementation of the format:
in particular, I vaguely recall that it had TZ troubles with at least
some of the Exchange-produces ics files (but that might have been a bug
in Exchange as well - I don't remember).

But after all these years, I'm still using the same manual method you
are using :-( So if you decide to go ahead, I for one would be
eternally grateful.

Nick

PS There have been occasional outbursts on the ML about ICS, so you
probably should search the list for what others might have done.