ICal has some complexity to it: Events, TODOs and Journal entries can be repeated, removed from the feed and edited later on. This tool takes care of these circumstances.
Let's put our expertise together and build a tool that can solve this!
- day light saving time (DONE)
- recurring events (DONE)
- recurring events with edits (DONE)
- recurring events where events are omitted (DONE)
- recurring events events where the edit took place later (DONE)
- normal events (DONE)
- recurrence of dates but not hours, minutes, and smaller (DONE)
- endless recurrence (DONE)
- ending recurrence (DONE)
- events with start date and no end date (DONE)
- events with start as date and start as datetime (DONE)
- RRULE (DONE)
- RDATE (DONE)
- DURATION (DONE)
- EXDATE (DONE)
- X-WR-TIMEZONE compatibilty (DONE)
Not included:
- EXRULE (deprecated), see 8.3.2. Properties Registry
pip install recurring-ical-events
- Support using GitHub Sponsors
- Fund specific issues using Polar
- Support using Open Collective
- Support using thanks.dev
We accept donations to sustain our work, once or regular. Consider donating money to open-source as everyone benefits.
import icalendar
import recurring_ical_events
import urllib.request
start_date = (2019, 3, 5)
end_date = (2019, 4, 1)
url = "http://tinyurl.com/y24m3r8f"
ical_string = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
calendar = icalendar.Calendar.from_ical(ical_string)
events = recurring_ical_events.of(calendar).between(start_date, end_date)
for event in events:
start = event["DTSTART"].dt
duration = event["DTEND"].dt - event["DTSTART"].dt
print("start {} duration {}".format(start, duration))
Output:
start 2019-03-18 04:00:00+01:00 duration 1:00:00
start 2019-03-20 04:00:00+01:00 duration 1:00:00
start 2019-03-19 04:00:00+01:00 duration 1:00:00
start 2019-03-07 02:00:00+01:00 duration 1:00:00
start 2019-03-08 01:00:00+01:00 duration 2:00:00
start 2019-03-09 03:00:00+01:00 duration 0:30:00
start 2019-03-10 duration 1 day, 0:00:00
The icalendar module is responsible for parsing and converting calendars. The recurring_ical_events module uses such a calendar and creates all repetitions of its events within a time span.
To import this module, write
import recurring_ical_events
There are several methods you can use to unfold repeating events, such as at(a_time)
and between(a_start, an_end)
.
You can get all events which take place at a_date
.
A date can be a year, e.g. 2023
, a month of a year e.g. January in 2023 (2023, 1)
, a day of a certain month e.g. (2023, 1, 1)
, an hour e.g. (2023, 1, 1, 0)
, a minute e.g. (2023, 1, 1, 0, 0)
, or second as well as a datetime.date object and datetime.datetime.
The start and end are inclusive. As an example: if an event is longer than one day it is still included if it takes place at a_date
.
a_date = 2023 # a year
a_date = (2023,) # a year
a_date = (2023, 1) # January in 2023
a_date = (2023, 1, 1) # the 1st of January in 2023
a_date = "20230101" # the 1st of January in 2023
a_date = (2023, 1, 1, 0) # the first hour of the year 2023
a_date = (2023, 1, 1, 0, 0) # the first minute in 2023
a_date = datetime.date(2023) # the first day in 2023
a_date = datetime.date(2023, 1, 1) # the first day in 2023
a_date = datetime.datetime.now() # this exact second
events = recurring_ical_events.of(an_icalendar_object).at(a_date)
The resulting events
are a list of icalendar events, see below.
between(start, end)
returns all events happening between a start and an end time. Both arguments can be datetime.datetime, datetime.date, tuples of numbers passed as arguments to datetime.datetime or strings in the form of
%Y%m%d
(yyyymmdd
) and %Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ
(yyyymmddThhmmssZ
).
For examples, see at(a_date)
above.
events = recurring_ical_events.of(an_icalendar_object).between(start, end)
The resulting events
are in a list of icalendar events, see below.
The result of both between(start, end)
and at(a_date)
is a list of icalendar events.
By default, all attributes of the event with repetitions are copied, like UID
and SUMMARY
.
However, these attributes may differ from the source event:
DTSTART
which is the start of the event instance. (always present)DTEND
which is the end of the event instance. (always present)RDATE
,EXDATE
,RRULE
are the rules to create event repetitions. They are not included in repeated events, see Issue 23. To change this, useof(calendar, keep_recurrence_attributes=True)
.
By default the recurring_ical_events
only selects events as the name already implies.
However, there are different components available in a calendar.
You can select which components you like to have returned by passing components
to the of
function:
of(a_calendar, components=["VEVENT"])
Here is a template code for choosing the supported types of components:
events = recurring_ical_events.of(calendar).between(...)
journals = recurring_ical_events.of(calendar, components=["VJOURNAL"]).between(...)
todos = recurring_ical_events.of(calendar, components=["VTODO"]).between(...)
all = recurring_ical_events.of(calendar, components=["VTODO", "VEVENT", "VJOURNAL"]).between(...)
If a type of component is not listed here, it can be added. Please create an issue for this in the source code repository.
If you use between()
or at()
several times, it is faster to re-use the object coming from of()
.
rcalendar = recurring_ical_events.of(an_icalendar_object)
events_of_day_1 = rcalendar.at(day_1)
events_of_day_2 = rcalendar.at(day_2)
events_of_day_3 = rcalendar.at(day_3)
# ...
If you use this library in your code, you may want to make sure that
updates can be received but they do not break your code.
The version numbers are handeled this way: a.b.c
example: 0.1.12
c
is changed for each minor bug fix.b
is changed whenever new features are added.a
is changed when the interface or major assumptions change that may break your code.
So, I recommend to version-fix this library to stay with the same a
while b
and c
can change.
To run the tests, we use tox
.
tox
tests all different Python versions which we want to be compatible to.
pip3 install tox
To run all the tests:
tox
To run the tests in a specific Python version:
tox -e py39
This project's development is driven by tests. Tests assure a consistent interface and less knowledge lost over time. If you like to change the code, tests help that nothing breaks in the future. They are required in that sense. Example code and ics files can be transferred into tests and speed up fixing bugs.
You can view the tests in the test folder.
If you have a calendar ICS file for which this library does not
generate the desired output, you can add it to the test/calendars
folder and write tests for what you expect.
If you like, open an issue first, e.g. to discuss the changes and
how to go about it.
To release new versions,
edit the Changelog Section
edit setup.py, the
__version__
variablecreate a commit and push it
wait for GitHub Actions to finish the build
run
python3 setup.py tag_and_deploy
notify the issues about their release
- v2.1.1
- Claim and test support for Python 3.11.
- Support deleting events by setting RRULE UNTIL < DTSTART, see Issue 117.
- v2.1.0
- Added support for PERIOD values in RDATE. See Issue 113.
- Fixed
icalendar>=5.0.9
to supportRDATE
of typePERIOD
with a time zone. - Fixed
pytz>=2023.3
to assure compatibility.
- v2.0.2
- Fixed omitting last event of
RRULE
withUNTIL
when usingpytz
, the event starting in winter time and ending in summer time. See Issue 107.
- Fixed omitting last event of
- v2.0.1
- Fixed crasher with duplicate RRULE. See Pull Request 104
- v2.0.0b
- Only return
VEVENT
by default. Addof(... ,components=...)
parameter to select which kinds of components should be returned. See Issue 101. - Remove
beta
indicator. This library works okay: Feature requests come in, not so much bug reports.
- Only return
- v1.1.0b
- Add repeated TODOs and Journals. See Pull Request 100 and Issue 97.
- v1.0.3b
- Remove syntax anomalies in README.
- Switch to GitHub actions because GitLab decided to remove support.
- v1.0.2b
- Add support for
X-WR-TIMEZONE
calendars which contain events without an explicit time zone, see Issue 86.
- Add support for
- v1.0.1b
- Add support for
zoneinfo.ZoneInfo
time zones, see Issue 57. - Migrate from Travis CI to Gitlab CI.
- Add code coverage on Gitlab.
- Add support for
- v1.0.0b
- v0.2.4b
- Events with a duration of 0 seconds are correctly returned.
between()
andat()
take the same kind of arguments. These arguments are documented.
- v0.2.3b
- v0.2.2b
- Check that
at()
does not return an event starting at the next day, see Issue 44.
- Check that
- v0.2.1b
- Check that recurring events are removed if they are modified to leave the requested time span, see Issue 62.
- v0.2.0b
- Add ability to keep the recurrence attributes (RRULE, RDATE, EXDATE) on the event copies instead of stripping them. See Pull Request 54.
- v0.1.21b
- Fix issue with repetitions over DST boundary. See Issue 48.
- v0.1.20b
- Fix handling of modified recurrences with lower sequence number than their base event Pull Request 45
- v0.1.19b
- v0.1.18b
- v0.1.17b
- Handle Issue 28 where passed arguments lead to errors where it is expected to work.
- v0.1.16b
- Events with an empty RRULE are handled like events without an RRULE.
- Remove fixed dependency versions, see Issue 14
- v0.1.15b
- Repeated events also include subcomponents. Issue 6
- v0.1.14b
- Fix compatibility issue 20: EXDATEs of different time zones are now supported.
- v0.1.13b
- Remove attributes RDATE, EXDATE, RRULE from repeated events Issue 23
- Use vDDDTypes instead of explicit date/datetime type Pull Request 19
- Start Changelog
- python-dateutil - to compute the recurrences of events using
rrule
- icalendar - the library used to parse ICS files
- pytz - for timezones
- x-wr-timezone for handling the non-standard
X-WR-TIMEZONE
property.
- icalevents - another library for roughly the same use-case
- Open Web Calendar - a web calendar to embed into websites which uses this library
- icspy - to create your own calendar events
Nicco Kunzmann talked about this library at the FOSSASIA 2022 Summit:
- RFC 5545
- RFC 7986 -- an update to RFC 5545. It does not change any properties useful for scheduling events.
- Stackoverflow question this is created for
- https://github.com/oberron/annum
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20268204/ical-get-date-from-recurring-event-by-rrule-and-dtstart
- collective/icalendar#162
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46471852/ical-parsing-reoccuring-events-in-python
- RDATE https://stackoverflow.com/a/46709850/1320237