The goal of calendar is to make it easy to create, read, write, and work
with iCalander (.ics, .ical or similar) files, and the scheduling
data they represent, in R. iCalendar is an open standard for “exchanging
calendar and scheduling information between users and computers”
described at icalendar.org (the full spec can
be found in a plain text file
here).
Recently the UK Government endorsed the iCal format in a publication for the ‘Open Standards for Government’ series. An example .ics file is provided by the .gov.uk domain, which shows holidays in England and Wales.
install.packages("calendar")Or install the cutting edge from GitHub
devtools::install_github("ATFutures/calendar")library(calendar)A minimal example representing the contents of an iCalendar file is
provided in the dataset ical_example, which is loaded when the package
is attached. This is what iCal files look like:
ical_example
#> [1] "BEGIN:VCALENDAR"
#> [2] "PRODID:-//Google Inc//Google Calendar 70.9054//EN"
#> [3] "VERSION:2.0"
#> [4] "CALSCALE:GREGORIAN"
#> [5] "METHOD:PUBLISH"
#> [6] "X-WR-CALNAME:atf-test"
#> [7] "X-WR-TIMEZONE:Europe/London"
#> [8] "BEGIN:VEVENT"
#> [9] "DTSTART:20180809T160000Z"
#> [10] "DTEND:20180809T163000Z"
#> [11] "DTSTAMP:20180810T094100Z"
#> [12] "UID:[email protected]"
#> [13] "CREATED:20180807T133712Z"
#> [14] "DESCRIPTION:\\n"
#> [15] "LAST-MODIFIED:20180807T133712Z"
#> [16] "LOCATION:"
#> [17] "SEQUENCE:0"
#> [18] "STATUS:CONFIRMED"
#> [19] "SUMMARY:ical programming mission"
#> [20] "TRANSP:OPAQUE"
#> [21] "END:VEVENT"
#> [22] "END:VCALENDAR"Relevant fields can be found and extracted as follows:
which(ic_find(ical_example, "TSTAMP"))
#> [1] 11
ic_extract(ical_example, "TSTAMP")
#> [1] "D20180810T094100Z"A larger example shows all national holidays in England and Wales. It can be read-in as follows:
ics_file <- system.file("extdata", "england-and-wales.ics", package = "calendar")
ics_raw = readLines(ics_file)
head(ics_raw) # check it's in the ICS format
#> [1] "BEGIN:VCALENDAR"
#> [2] "VERSION:2.0"
#> [3] "METHOD:PUBLISH"
#> [4] "PRODID:-//uk.gov/GOVUK calendars//EN"
#> [5] "CALSCALE:GREGORIAN"
#> [6] "BEGIN:VEVENT"A list representation of the calendar can be created using ic_list()
as follows:
ics_list = ic_list(ics_raw)
ics_list[1:2]
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120103"
#> [2] "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120102"
#> [3] "SUMMARY:New Year’s Day"
#> [4] "UID:[email protected]"
#> [5] "SEQUENCE:0"
#> [6] "DTSTAMP:20180806T114130Z"
#>
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120407"
#> [2] "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120406"
#> [3] "SUMMARY:Good Friday"
#> [4] "UID:[email protected]"
#> [5] "SEQUENCE:0"
#> [6] "DTSTAMP:20180806T114130Z"A data frame representing the calendar can be created as follows (work in progress):
ics_df = ic_read(ics_file) # read it in
head(ics_df) # check the results
#> # A tibble: 6 × 6
#> `DTEND;VALUE=DATE` `DTSTART;VALUE=DATE` SUMMARY UID SEQUENCE DTSTAMP
#> <date> <date> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 2012-01-03 2012-01-02 New Year’s Day ca6a… 0 201808…
#> 2 2012-04-07 2012-04-06 Good Friday ca6a… 0 201808…
#> 3 2012-04-10 2012-04-09 Easter Monday ca6a… 0 201808…
#> 4 2012-05-08 2012-05-07 Early May bank… ca6a… 0 201808…
#> 5 2012-06-05 2012-06-04 Spring bank ho… ca6a… 0 201808…
#> 6 2012-06-06 2012-06-05 Queen’s Diamon… ca6a… 0 201808…What class is each column?
vapply(ics_df, class, character(1))
#> DTEND;VALUE=DATE DTSTART;VALUE=DATE SUMMARY UID
#> "Date" "Date" "character" "character"
#> SEQUENCE DTSTAMP
#> "character" "character"To make the package robust we test on a wide range of ical formats. Here’s an example from my work calendar, for example:
my_cal = ic_dataframe(ical_outlook)
my_cal$SUMMARY[1]
#> [1] "In Budapest for European R Users Meeting (eRum) conference"
# calculate the duration of the European R users meeting event:
my_cal$`DTEND;VALUE=DATE`[1] - my_cal$`DTSTART;VALUE=DATE`[1]
#> Time difference of 4 days- A Python package for working with ics files: https://github.com/ics-py/ics-py
- A JavaScript package by Mozilla: https://github.com/kewisch/ical.js
- Ruby library: https://github.com/icalendar/icalendar
- The ical R package on CRAN for reading .ics files: https://github.com/petermeissner/ical
