Encoding newlines in iCal files

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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)));

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";

=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