melfneerg.com

- 'cos life is like that

About the Author
Tudor Davies

author Tudor is a techie turned manager who fights like mad to keep his tech skills honed and relevant. Everything from web hosting, networking, *nix and the like. Constantly developing and co-ordinating with others to make the web a better (and easier to use) place.

ICAL generation

Monday, 22nd Aug 2011 Posted @ 11:17

I had a need to generate an ICAL (.ics) file to use on my iPhone so decided to create a PHP script to do it. The reason - planning my film watching at FrightFest 2011
I had the base information in a CSV file, that looked like this:

20110825,1730,MAIN,Dont Be Afraid Of The Dark,100
20110825,2015,MAIN,Final Destination 5 - 3D,95
20110825,2230,MAIN,The Theatre Bizarre,108

The information is date, start time (-1 hr for BST), screen being shown on, film title and length

Here is the code to take the csv files and output it as a CSV file. It is used by running php ical.php > ical.ics

// set the timezone so that date functions work without errors
date_default_timezone_set("Europe/London");

//specify the name of the CSV file and open it for read only access
$urlfile = "./ical.csv";
$handle = fopen($urlfile, "r");

//do the ICAL headers
echo "BEGIN:VCALENDAR";
echo "VERSION:2.0";
echo "CALSCALE:GREGORIAN";
echo "BEGIN:VTIMEZONE";
echo "TZID:Europe/London";
echo "X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London";
echo "BEGIN:DAYLIGHT";
echo "TZOFFSETFROM:+0000";
echo "TZOFFSETTO:+0100";
echo "TZNAME:BST";
echo "DTSTART:19700329T010000";
echo "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU";
echo "END:DAYLIGHT";
echo "BEGIN:STANDARD";
echo "TZOFFSETFROM:+0100";
echo "TZOFFSETTO:+0000";
echo "TZNAME:GMT";
echo "DTSTART:19701025T020000";
echo "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU";
echo "END:STANDARD";
echo "END:VTIMEZONE";

// read file line by line
// and process each one in a loop
while (! feof($handle))
{
$line = fgetcsv($handle, 128);
$dt = $line[0];
$start = $line[1];
$screen = $line[2];
$film = $line[3];
$length = $line[4];

// check if entry is empty
// if so, dont execute the script

if ($dt <> "") {

// start writing the event info out
echo "BEGIN:VEVENT";
echo "DTSTART:".$dt."T".$start."00Z";

// calculate the end time based on the start and length
$end = strtotime($start);
$end = $end + ($length * 60);
$finish = date("His", $end);
echo "DTEND:".$dt."T".$finish."Z";

echo "SUMMARY:".$screen." - ".$film."";
//echo $dt, $start, $film, $length;
echo "END:VEVENT";
}

}

// write the ICAL footer
echo "END:VCALENDAR";

// close the csv file
fclose($handle);
?>

All I did then was subscribe to the .ics on my iPhone and hey presto - all the information is there for me to browse through :)

[ no comments : Add ]

start

layout and initial css based on the Qtractor page