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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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

Solution 3:

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.