I'm working on a script to parse long .ics (iCal export) files to remove every event that occurs after a date.

I'm looking at the date section of the DTSTART event property of the VEVENT (see theRFC.) to determine whether the entire VEVENT component (as defined as everything that goes between BEGIN:VEVENT and END:VEVENT) should be included in the output file.

But for some reason this isn't happening properly. The entire input file is ending up in the output file here.

If I match for a Beginning event using !~/BEGIN:VEVENT/ in line 29 and =~ /BEGIN:VEVENT/ in line 30 no events are put into the output file. This is quite confusing. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my ($foo, $bar);

my $infile = $ARGV[0];
my $enddate = $ARGV[1];
if (!$infile||!$enddate){print "Syntax calarchiver.pl <filename> <endd
+ate> (as 'YYYYMMDD')"; exit;}

my $outfile=$infile;
$outfile =~ s/.ics/.archive.ics/g;

open (IN,'<', $infile) or die "Cannot open $infile";
open (OUT, '>', $outfile) or die "cannot open $outfile";

my $inevt =0;
my $evt='';
my $badevt=0;
my $instr;
my @parts;
my @dparts;

while (<IN>) {
    $instr = $_;
    chomp($instr);
    @parts = split(/:/,$instr);

PARSE: {
    if (($instr ne "BEGIN:VEVENT") && !$inevt){ print OUT $_; last PAR
+SE;}
    if ($instr eq "BEGIN:VEVENT"){$inevt = 1; $evt .= $instr; last PAR
+SE;}
    if ($parts[0] =~ /DTSTART/){
            @dparts = split(/T/, $parts[1]);
            if ($dparts[0] > $enddate){$badevt=1; last PARSE;} 
            else {$badevt =0; $evt .= $instr; last PARSE;}
        }
     if ($inevt && !$badevt) {$evt .=$instr;  last PARSE;}
     if ($instr eq "END:VEVENT"){
         if ($badevt){$inevt=0;$badevt=0;$evt='';print "bad event \n";
+last PARSE;} 
         else {$evt .= $instr; print " good event \n"; print OUT $evt;
+ $inevt=0;$badevt=0;$evt=''; last PARSE;}
         }
     $foo=$bar;
    }
}

close OUT;
close IN;

exit;

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In reply to Problems with seemingly simple string matching... by desertrat

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