how to make iCal4j not fail on parsing errors (like 00001231T000000Z)

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14106844

  •  13-12-2021
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Question

I am trying to get iCal4j to parse an exported Google .ics calendar file. Unfortunately the parser chokes on a particular value (00001231T000000Z) and throws an exception. My question is how can I get the parser to continue despite the bad data? I am about to edit the source code but is there not a way to configure it to not fail on a date parse error.

I am using ical4j-1.0.5-SNAPSHOT - which I believe is based on the latest code.

My data contains the following event (which appears to be a recurring one):

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Vancouver:20101206T060000
DTEND;TZID=America/Vancouver:20101206T150000
RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;UNTIL=20101210T140000Z
DTSTAMP:20121231T143813Z
UID:[deleted]@google.com
CREATED:00001231T000000Z
DESCRIPTION:
LAST-MODIFIED:20110102T020817Z
LOCATION:
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:iCal4j chokes on this
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT

and dies when it tries to parse this date value (which seems to be a nonsense/bad value)

CREATED:00001231T000000Z

I don't particularly care if the created field is set or is set to a dummy value. What I care about is the parser continuing and not choking on bad data.

I have tried setting the parsing to relaxed, but somehow this case seems to slip through.

        CompatibilityHints.setHintEnabled(
            CompatibilityHints.KEY_RELAXED_PARSING, true);

So, how can I make this code more robust to parse errors? Can I supply my own parser? Can I get it to skip records that have errors?

Was it helpful?

Solution

This is actually a regression. Relaxed parsing should have covered this case. Just fixed it in both branch and tip (http://ical4j.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/ical4j/ical4j/rev/8c23205afac9).

OTHER TIPS

I copied the CalendarBuilder class and wrapped the property set method with a try/catch as below. I'm still interested to hear other solutions to this. I really dislike having to copy an entire class to fix something like this.

    public void propertyValue(final String value)
            throws URISyntaxException, ParseException, IOException {

        assertProperty(property);

        try {
            if (property instanceof Escapable) {
                property.setValue(Strings.unescape(value));
            } else {
                property.setValue(value);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Logger.warn("Could not set propety: " + property.getName()
                    + " to " + value);
        }
    }

Have you tried setting all these together ?

ical4j.unfolding.relaxed=true
ical4j.parsing.relaxed=true
ical4j.validation.relaxed=true
ical4j.compatibility.outlook=true
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