ERROR: The iCalendar file was malformed.

[seth]

I cannot import my remember the milk ics file. I followed the
directions on the RTM website to export their ICS file to my windows 7
desktop (tried 3 different machines) but then I get the subject line
error when I try to import the ICS file using google tasks porter. I
have no idea how to post a log or anything so any advice would be
appreciated.

[Dwight Guth]

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear that you're having a problem with this.  I'm afraid there's not a lot I can really do about it, actually.  This is a known issue which results from the fact that Remember the Milk does a few nonstandard things with their export format which cause it to not validate correctly for software which rigorously adheres to the standard for ics files.  If you give me the ID of your import task (you should be able to see it in the url of the delete link on the /import page) I can look it up in my logs and attempt to determine what has gone wrong, and inform you of how you might be able to manually correct the file in order for it to work.  Other than that I'm afraid there's really not a lot I can do.  I suggest you contact the Remember the Milk people and encourage them to work on improving the conformity of their ics export to the standards.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Dwight Guth

[seth]

Thanks. I suspected it was something that RTM was doing that was no
compliant.

The ID of the task is id=14008. Thanks.

[Dwight Guth]

Hmm.  It looks like I may be wrong about the reason this was happening.  Can you tell me if the tasks you exported used any nonstandard characters?  It would appear that that is one way I am able to reproduce this error.  I will put this on the list of bugs to be taken care of and hopefully it will be resolved sometime this week.

Dwight

[seth]

I removed a "?" and an "!" from two of the tasks and looked to see if
there were any other nonstandard characters. I did not see any so I
tried to upload a new file but got the same error.

Here's the latest error log: id=8177.

Thanks for looking into this. I know this is probably way down the
list of Google priorities.

[Dwight Guth]

Hmm, well, if you don't see anything other than a couple characters of punctuation, I really don't know what it could be.  Somewhere you have a field that is supposed to be a string but which is not being parsed by the iCalendar parser.  Now this can happen because of Unicode characters that it does not support, but I would be willing to believe it might also happen in other circumstances as well.  Unfortunately I have no idea what those might be.

You might try isolating which task is generating the error.  iCalendar is a plain text format where each individual task begins with the line BEGIN:VTODO and ends with END:VTODO.  If you open the file in a text editor and remove tasks one by one until the error goes away, you might be able to figure out which task is generating the error.  Once you find that out, I might be able to tell what's wrong with it if I took a look at it.

Dwight

[seth]

So i tried deleting all tasks except one that is plan text with no
special characters and it threw an error again.

id=29001

Must be something in the items that come before the "BEGIN:TODO"
section.

[Dwight Guth]

Would you mind terribly if I asked you to attach the stripped file to an email to this group so I can take a look at it and try it myself?

[Dwight Guth]

Okay, so I have just finished replacing the code that parses icalendar files with another code library so that it will support unicode characters.  Can you please try your import again and let me know if it works?  if not, I would like to see the stripped-down file which is generating an error.

[seth]

I'm stuck and probably going to give up.

I tried to import the task on August 12 and when I checked back today,
I see the following:

08/12/2011 08:07:39 a.m. UTC - Importing...

It is locked up and I can't load a different file.

On Aug 11, 11:07 pm, Dwight Guth <dwightg...@google.com> wrote:
> Okay, so I have just finished replacing the code that parses icalendar files
> with another code library so that it will support unicode characters.  Can
> you please try your import again and let me know if it works?  if not, I
> would like to see the stripped-down file which is generating an error.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Dwight Guth <dwightg...@google.com> wrote:
> > Would you mind terribly if I asked you to attach the stripped file to an
> > email to this group so I can take a look at it and try it myself?
>