Re: icalendar "description" suggestion

[Ulf Jasper <ulf.jasper@web.de>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:
> It would be nice if icalendar-import-buffer understood this convention
> and deleted any text before the magic string from the description.
>
> More generally it would be nice to be able to exert more control the
> over formatting of the description than is provided by a format string
> like icalendar-import-format-description.  For instance, in my case I
> want to compact sequences of newlines into a single newline.

That magic string stuff is not part of the icalendar standard.  It is
just some secret convention that some ical export tool uses. It may
change anytime. I don't think that icalendar.el should support stuff
like that.

Instead I suggest to allow not only format strings but also functions as
values of icalendar-import-format-description. Such a function must take
the imported description string as argument. Of course, the same should
be done for the other icalendar-import-format-* variables and for
icalendar-import-format itself (which would require a function with more
than 1 arguments).

That will give users complete control over the import of icalendar data.

However, I see a problem regarding export of diary data. Import and
export was supposed to be reversible and so icalendar.el currently uses
icalendar-import-format-* for *formatting icalendar entries* when
importing and for *parsing diary entries* when exporting. This will not
work with formatting functions.

On the other hand: I have noticed there are other problems with export,
so this might not count. ;)

Ulf

-- 
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