Question

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?

Answer 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.