Comments on: Is it possible to export an .ics file from iCal containing just today's events from specific calendars?

Question: Is it possible to export an .ics file from iCal containing just today's events from specific calendars?

jack_mo — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 11:28:39 -0800

Is it possible to export an .ics file from iCal containing just today's events from specific calendars?

I assumed I'd be able to do this with Automator, but it doesn't have any actions for exporting from iCal.

So is there a way to do this, perhaps with Applescript? I've tried Googling to no avail - there seem to be plenty of scripts to export todo items in various ways, but nothing regarding calendars for a given date that I could find.

Alternatively, is it possible to make a new 'daily' calendar containing all today's events from specific calendars (and nothing else), which I could then export manually? Again, I can't get Automator to do this - the New iCal Events action won't take input from Filter Items in iCal or Get Specified iCal Items.

I'm running iCal 3.0 on OS 10.5.

By: drfu

drfu — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:42:02 -0800

Looks like you can drag and drop individual events to the desktop as ics files. i don't see a way to grab any more than one item at a time though.

I pulled two separate events to the desktop though, and hacked them together in a text editor. The resulting ics file imported perfectly into iCal, so that may be your solution. Key parts of the orginal ics files you want to smush together are the BEGIN:VEVENT and END:VEVENT chunks (inclusive). Be sure to leave all of the rest of headers alone, or you can experiment with the values if you are feeling bold!

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:42:17 -0800

Thanks drfu - that's what I've been doing to date (no pun intended) but it's pretty fiddly and I was hoping for something a bit more automagical... though having asked this question on other sites and mailing lists, and even mailed developers of calendar/PIM apps about it over the years, I'm pretty much resigned to using your method for evermore!