Python Google Calendar Parser

This is a parser for Google Calendar's XML atom feed and iCal (.ics) export formats. I needed something like this for a project where I couldn't use Google's python api, and I didn't find any practical calendar parsers out there, so I built this one.

Requirements

This module depends on icalendar, beautifulsoup, and pytz. These dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt file, and may be installed by doing:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

The goal of this module is to allow for the simple manipulation of calendar events like they were any other python data structure. As such, the CalendarParser object acts as a simple list-like interface for the calendar's events, which themselves are plain dictionaries with straight-forward keys containing the properties of the event.

CalendarParser can accept either url or local file inputs:

from calendar_parser import CalendarParser
    
xml_feed = "https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/.../basic"
xml_file = "/path/to/file.xml"
    
ics_url = "https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/.../basic.ics"
ics_file = "/path/to/file.ics"
  
cal = CalendarParser( xml_url=xml_feed [, xml_file=xml_file, ics_url=ics_url, ics_file=ics_file ] )

The calendar data isn't fetched until you request to parse it. By default, the parse_calendar method returns a generator to let you iterate through the event dictionaries as they're being parsed.

for event in cal.parse_calendar():
    print event["name"]

However, you can force the parser to return a list, thus parsing all the events at once.

redundant_event_list = cal.parse_calendar(force_list=True)

In the case that you plan on using iCal and xml sources interchangeably, you can tell the parser which source to use.

cal.xml_url = xml_feed
cal.ics_url = ics_url

ics_events = cal.parse_calendar(force_list=True, use_ics=True)
xml_events = cal.parse_calendar(force_list=True, use_xml=True)

(not all of the same event/calendar properties are available from both ics and xml resources, so it's not an unlikely scenario)

Since this is possible, and the parser overwrites its events list every time it parses a resource, if you don't want to overwrite your existing events list, you can specify that as well.

cal.parse_calendar(force_list=True, use_xml=True)

for event in cal.parse_calendar(use_ics=True, overwrite_events=False):
    # Just want to see what I'm missing out on, but don't want to
    # commit to using the iCal data
    ...
    
    # Oh and look, I can still access the xml event data in here!
    print event.name in cal.events

Also, as was just alluded to, you may access any of an event's properties either as keys in a
dictionary (event.name), or as attributes of an object (event["name"]).

And you can use the names of events like keys in a dictionary on the CalendarParser object.

from datetime import datetime

if  "my birthday" in cal and cal["my birthday"].start_time.date() == datetime.today().date():
    print "Happy Birthday To Me!"

Or look them up by their index like a list.

top_event = cal[0]
top_5_events = cal[0:5]

And finally, since Google's calendar output isn't usually sorted chronologically, you have the option to sort them as you wish.

latest_first = cal.sort_by_latest()
cal.sort_by_oldest(sort_in_place=True)

A fun side-effect of this, is that you may also compare events (based on their start_time) like normal datetime objects.

if cal[0] > cal[1]:
    print "The events are sorted by latest-first!"
else:
    print "The events are not sorted by latest-first."

Enjoy!

Properties

CalendarParser
- title
- subtitle
- author
- email
- calendar [name]
- time_zone
- last_updated
- date_published
- events
CalendarEvent
- name
- description
- location
- start_time
- end_time
- all_day
- repeats
- repeat_freq
- repeat_day
- repeat_month
- repeat_until

oblique63/Python-GoogleCalendarParser

Python Google Calendar Parser

Requirements

Usage

Properties

Licensing