Jim's Blog

Accented chars in calendars

I've been working on a side project where I scape a bunch of pages and change the info into an ical file so that I can use it in google calendar. More about that project later.

I ran into some problems with accented characters (of course) always showing up broken. I think that I have a solution (not 100% sure yet because it takes a while for google to refresh a feed). A super helpful post mentioned that "The HTTP/1.1 standard says that if content-type is text/* and no charset is given, the character set (encoding) is ISO-8859-1 (latin1).". A quick "curl -i" on my url and sure enough the http header only had Content-Type: text/calendar.

Mostly I've always dealt with server code, not configing apache, and especially not on a host where I may not have access to change config. A little bit more searching lead to a post about changing the .htaccess file. Added a line saying AddType 'text/calendar; charset=utf-8' ics, double check with my curl command and the file is returning the correct header.

This took me a bit of digging because I thought that it was something wrong with how I was writing the file and needing to change the libs that I was using. Apparently I was just screwing things up because I was opening them with textedit which showed the files as broken. Opening them in ical (which I don't use) showed everything correctly. A day of searching leads to new knowledge and a 3 minute fix. Ah, software...

Update: it worked.