PHP ICS Parser

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Installation

Requirements

• PHP 5 (≥ 5.3.9)
• Valid ICS (.ics, .ical, .ifb) file
• IANA, Unicode CLDR or Windows Time Zones

Setup

• Install Composer
  • Add the following dependency to composer.json
    • ⚠️ Note with Composer the owner is johngrogg and not u01jmg3
  • To access the latest stable branch (v2) use the following

    • To access new features you can require dev-master

      {
          "require": {
              "johngrogg/ics-parser": "^2"
          }
      }

Running tests

composer test

How to use

How to instantiate the Parser

• Using the example script as a guide, refer to this code

What will the parser return?

• Each key/value pair from the iCal file will be parsed creating an associative array for both the calendar and every event it contains.

• Also injected will be content under dtstart_tz and dtend_tz for accessing start and end dates with time zone data applied.

• Where possible DateTime objects are used and returned.

  • ℹ️ Note the parser is limited to relative date formats which can inhibit how complex recurrence rule parts are processed (e.g. BYDAY combined with BYSETPOS)

  // Dump the whole calendar
  var_dump($ical->cal);
  
  // Dump every event
  var_dump($ical->events());

• Also included are special {property}_array arrays which further resolve the contents of a key/value pair.

  // Dump a parsed event's start date
  var_dump($event->dtstart_array);
  
  // array (size=4)
  //   0 =>
  //     array (size=1)
  //       'TZID' => string 'America/Detroit' (length=15)
  //   1 => string '20160409T090000' (length=15)
  //   2 => int 1460192400
  //   3 => string 'TZID=America/Detroit:20160409T090000' (length=36)

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When Parsing an iCal Feed

Parsing iCal/iCalendar/ICS resources can pose several challenges. One challenge is that the specification is a moving target; the original RFC has only been updated four times in ten years. The other challenge is that vendors were both liberal (read: creative) in interpreting the specification and productive implementing proprietary extensions.

However, what impedes efficient parsing most directly are recurrence rules for events. This library parses the original calendar into an easy to work with memory model. This requires that each recurring event is expanded or exploded. Hence, a single event that occurs daily will generate a new event instance for each day as this parser processes the calendar ($defaultSpan limits this). To get an idea how this is done take a look at the call graph.

As a consequence the entire calendar is parsed line-by-line, and thus loaded into memory, first. As you can imagine large calendars tend to get huge when exploded i.e. with all their recurrence rules evaluated. This is exacerbated when old calendars do not remove past events as they get fatter and fatter every year.

This limitation is particularly painful if you only need a window into the original calendar. It seems wasteful to parse the entire fully exploded calendar into memory if you later are going to call the eventsFromInterval() or eventsFromRange() on it.

In late 2018 #190 added the option to drop all events outside a given range very early in the parsing process at the cost of some precision (time zone calculations are not calculated at that point). This massively reduces the total time for parsing a calendar. The same goes for memory consumption. The precondition is that you know upfront that you don't care about events outside a given range.

Let's say you are only interested in events from yesterday, today and tomorrow. To compensate for the fact that the tricky time zone transformations and calculations have not been executed yet by the time the parser has to decide whether to keep or drop an event you can set it to filter for +-2d instead of +-1d. Once it is done you would then call eventsFromRange() with +-1d to get precisely the events in the window you are interested in. That is what the variables $filterDaysBefore and $filterDaysAfter are for.

In Q1 2019 #213 further improved the performance by immediately dropping non-recurring events once parsed if they are outside that fuzzy window. This greatly reduces the maximum memory consumption for large calendars. PHP by default does not allocate more than 128MB heap and would otherwise crash with Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted. It goes without saying that recurring events first need to be evaluated before non-fitting events can be dropped.

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API

ICal API

Variables

Name	Configurable	Default Value	Description
$alarmCount	✖️	N/A	Tracks the number of alarms in the current iCal feed
$cal	✖️	N/A	The parsed calendar
$defaultSpan	☑️	2	The value in years to use for indefinite, recurring events
$defaultTimeZone	☑️	System default	Enables customisation of the default time zone
$defaultWeekStart	☑️	MO	The two letter representation of the first day of the week
$disableCharacterReplacement	☑️	false	Toggles whether to disable all character replacement. Will replace curly quotes and other special characters with their standard equivalents if false. Can be a costly operation!
$eventCount	✖️	N/A	Tracks the number of events in the current iCal feed
$filterDaysAfter	☑️	null	When set the parser will ignore all events more than roughly this many days after now. To be on the safe side it is advised that you make the filter window +/- 1 day larger than necessary. For performance reasons this filter is applied before any date and time zone calculations are done. Hence, depending the time zone settings of the parser and the calendar the cut-off date is not "calibrated". You can then use $ical->eventsFromRange() to precisely shrink the window.
$filterDaysBefore	☑️	null	When set the parser will ignore all events more than roughly this many days before now. See $filterDaysAfter above for more details.
$freeBusyCount	✖️	N/A	Tracks the free/busy count in the current iCal feed
$httpBasicAuth	✖️	array()	Holds the username and password for HTTP basic authentication
$httpUserAgent	✖️	null	Holds the custom User Agent string header
$httpAcceptLanguage	✖️	null	Holds the custom Accept Language request header, e.g. "en" or "de"
$shouldFilterByWindow	✖️	false	true if either $filterDaysBefore or $filterDaysAfter are set
$skipRecurrence	☑️	false	Toggles whether to skip the parsing of recurrence rules
$todoCount	✖️	N/A	Tracks the number of todos in the current iCal feed
$windowMaxTimestamp	✖️	null	If $filterDaysBefore or $filterDaysAfter are set then the events are filtered according to the window defined by this field and $windowMinTimestamp
$windowMinTimestamp	✖️	null	If $filterDaysBefore or $filterDaysAfter are set then the events are filtered according to the window defined by this field and $windowMaxTimestamp

Methods

Method	Parameter(s)	Visibility	Description
__construct	$files = false, $options = array()	public	Creates the ICal object
initFile	$file	protected	Initialises lines from a file
initLines	$lines	protected	Initialises the parser using an array containing each line of iCal content
initString	$string	protected	Initialises lines from a string
initUrl	$url, $username = null, $password = null, $userAgent = null, $acceptLanguage = null	protected	Initialises lines from a URL. Accepts a username/password combination for HTTP basic authentication, a custom User Agent string and the accepted client language
addCalendarComponentWithKeyAndValue	$component, $keyword, $value	protected	Add one key and value pair to the $this->cal array
calendarDescription	-	public	Returns the calendar description
calendarName	-	public	Returns the calendar name
calendarTimeZone	$ignoreUtc	public	Returns the calendar time zone
cleanData	$data	protected	Replaces curly quotes and other special characters with their standard equivalents
eventsFromInterval	$interval	public	Returns a sorted array of events following a given string, or false if no events exist in the range
eventsFromRange	$rangeStart = false, $rangeEnd = false	public	Returns a sorted array of events in a given range, or an empty array if no events exist in the range
events	-	public	Returns an array of Events
fileOrUrl	$filename	protected	Reads an entire file or URL into an array
filterValuesUsingBySetPosRRule	$bysetpos, $valueslist	protected	Filters a provided values-list by applying a BYSETPOS RRule
freeBusyEvents	-	public	Returns an array of arrays with all free/busy events
getDaysOfMonthMatchingByDayRRule	$bydays, $initialDateTime	protected	Find all days of a month that match the BYDAY stanza of an RRULE
hasEvents	-	public	Returns a boolean value whether the current calendar has events or not
iCalDateToDateTime	$icalDate	public	Returns a DateTime object from an iCal date time format
iCalDateToUnixTimestamp	$icalDate	public	Returns a Unix timestamp from an iCal date time format
iCalDateWithTimeZone	$event, $key, $format = DATE_TIME_FORMAT	public	Returns a date adapted to the calendar time zone depending on the event TZID
doesEventStartOutsideWindow	$event	protected	Determines whether the event start date is outside $windowMinTimestamp / $windowMaxTimestamp
isFileOrUrl	$filename	protected	Checks if a filename exists as a file or URL
isOutOfRange	$calendarDate, $minTimestamp, $maxTimestamp	protected	Determines whether a valid iCalendar date is within a given range
isValidCldrTimeZoneId	$timeZone	protected	Checks if a time zone is a valid CLDR time zone
isValidDate	$value	public	Checks if a date string is a valid date
isValidIanaTimeZoneId	$timeZone	protected	Checks if a time zone is a valid IANA time zone
isValidWindowsTimeZoneId	$timeZone	protected	Checks if a time zone is a recognised Windows (non-CLDR) time zone
isValidTimeZoneId	$timeZone	protected	Checks if a time zone is valid (IANA, CLDR, or Windows)
keyValueFromString	$text	protected	Gets the key value pair from an iCal string
mb_chr	$code	protected	Provides a polyfill for PHP 7.2's mb_chr(), which is a multibyte safe version of chr()
mb_str_replace	$search, $replace, $subject, $count = 0	protected	Replaces all occurrences of a search string with a given replacement string
escapeParamText	$candidateText	protected	Places double-quotes around texts that have characters not permitted in parameter-texts, but are permitted in quoted-texts.
parseDuration	$date, $duration, $format = 'U'	protected	Parses a duration and applies it to a date
parseExdates	$event	public	Parses a list of excluded dates to be applied to an Event
processDateConversions	-	protected	Processes date conversions using the time zone
processEvents	-	protected	Performs admin tasks on all events as read from the iCal file
processRecurrences	-	protected	Processes recurrence rules
reduceEventsToMinMaxRange		protected	Reduces the number of events to the defined minimum and maximum range
removeLastEventIfOutsideWindowAndNonRecurring		protected	Removes the last event (i.e. most recently parsed) if its start date is outside the window spanned by $windowMinTimestamp / $windowMaxTimestamp
removeUnprintableChars	$data	protected	Removes unprintable ASCII and UTF-8 characters
sortEventsWithOrder	$events, $sortOrder = SORT_ASC	public	Sorts events based on a given sort order
timeZoneStringToDateTimeZone	$timeZoneString	public	Returns a DateTimeZone object based on a string containing a time zone name.
unfold	$lines	protected	Unfolds an iCal file in preparation for parsing

Constants

Name	Description
DATE_TIME_FORMAT_PRETTY	Default pretty date time format to use
DATE_TIME_FORMAT	Default date time format to use
ICAL_DATE_TIME_TEMPLATE	String template to generate an iCal date time
ISO_8601_WEEK_START	First day of the week, as defined by ISO-8601
RECURRENCE_EVENT	Used to isolate generated recurrence events
SECONDS_IN_A_WEEK	The number of seconds in a week
TIME_FORMAT	Default time format to use
TIME_ZONE_UTC	UTC time zone string
UNIX_FORMAT	Unix timestamp date format
UNIX_MIN_YEAR	The year Unix time began

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Event API (extends ICal API)

Methods

Method	Parameter(s)	Visibility	Description
__construct	$data = array()	public	Creates the Event object
prepareData	$value	protected	Prepares the data for output
printData	$html = HTML_TEMPLATE	public	Returns Event data excluding anything blank within an HTML template
snakeCase	$input, $glue = '_', $separator = '-'	protected	Converts the given input to snake_case

Constants

Name	Description
HTML_TEMPLATE	String template to use when pretty printing content

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Credits

• Jonathan Goode (programming, bug fixing, enhancement, coding standard)
• John Grogg (programming, addition of event recurrence handling)

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Tools for Testing

• iCal Validator
• Recurrence Rule Tester
• Unix Timestamp Converter