Dear monks,

I'm currently struggling with a script that can parse iCalendar files and attachments in order to extract the useful information in a terse way and in it's God-given text form.

All was fine and dandy (I'm using Data::ICal and it works acceptably), until I ran into recurring events and the endless fun that lies in paragraph 4.8.5.4 of RFC2445. I have to admit this requires more intelligence that I'm prepared to sink in this so I really need some guidance, especially since I haven't found (yet) any modules that tackle this issue.

The only implementation I found so far is Google's, made in Java, but I'm not too keen to look at it because:

What I would like to obtain is something along the lines of "given a recurrence rule and a date, what's the next/previous instance of the recurring event?". I currently do this by some weird contraption looking for known rule patterns, but I'd much rather use a more advanced method.

P.S.: What makes it even worse is the "surely this has been attempted before" sensation, coupled with the utter lack of battle signs, victories, scars, or bodies lying across the related Google/CPAN/PM searches.

In reply to RFC 2445 recurrence rule parsing by rpetre

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