Cannot import ICAL feed to Google Calendar

Mmm, not come across this before. You mention that it might be the language the events are written in. Have you been able to test it without Japanese characters? Perhaps there’s an encoding issue here.

I have the blog mirrored on a test server. There, I did the following tests:

1) Remove all events and add a new event in english
-> google cant parse the calendar
-> looking in the .ics file, it has some japanese characters still for the blogname and username

2) Change blogname to English
-> google cant parse the calendar

3) Change username to english
-> google cant parse the calendar
-> google CAN import the ics file using ‘import calendar’

The ics file looks like this now:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-////NONSGML Events //EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:(Telford Japanese School) – Events
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://tjs2.zaccraven.co.uk/events/event
X-WR-CALDESC:(Telford Japanese School) – Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:[email protected]
STATUS:CONFIRMED
DTSTAMP:20140131T102525Z
CREATED:20140131T101948Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20140131T101948Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20140205
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20140206
SUMMARY: TEST EVENT
DESCRIPTION: test
ORGANIZER: zaccraven
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Weird.

The database is utf8.

All my blog webpages have this in the head:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

I just tried again to import the calendar manually using ‘import a calendar’. This time I could import a file that had Japanese text inside too:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-////NONSGML Events //EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:テルフォード補習授業校 - Events
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://tjs2.zaccraven.co.uk/events/event
X-WR-CALDESC:テルフォード補習授業校 - Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:[email protected]
STATUS:CONFIRMED
DTSTAMP:20140130T102048Z
CREATED:20140130T101948Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20140130T101948Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20140206
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20140207
SUMMARY: TEST ZZZEVENT
DESCRIPTION: tmmmmest
ORGANIZER: クレイバン
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Its strange. It seems like the .ics file might be OK but for some reason google cant parse the feed directly.

Some further info in case it helps…

I just tried to import the live calendar, full of Japanese events, into Google Calendar using the .ics file (not the feed). It gave the following error:

Processed zero events.

Failed to import events: Unable to process your ical/CSV file..

Error at line 16:For input string: “UNT”

Which means there is a problem near the text “UNTIL” in the record below:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-////NONSGML Events //EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:テルフォード補習授業校 - Events
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.telfordjs.org.uk/events/event
X-WR-CALDESC:テルフォード補習授業校 - Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:[email protected]
STATUS:CONFIRMED
DTSTAMP:20140131T203854Z
CREATED:20130407T175901Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20130407T180551Z
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20121221
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20121222
RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=1;BYDAY=;UNTIL=20121221T000000Z
SUMMARY: 正月お休み
DESCRIPTION: １２月１５日：学校 １２月２２日：お休み １２月２９日 ：お休み ２０１３年１月５日：学校

ORGANIZER: クレイバン
END:VEVENT

The value for BYDAY= is missing. What is the recurrence schedule for that event? “Every 1 week, on the ?”.

I’ll do a bit of testing to see why that isn’t showing up. It should be impossible to create an event recurring weekly without specifying the weekday(s) it repeats on…

Thanks for that.

The problem seems to have been the first event that I created in 2012. After deleting that old event, the calendar feed imported to Google.

Something maybe corrupted that record, either due to upgrading the plugin version or migrating server etc.