Comments on: How to Clean a Corrupt Event From iCal

By: Devon

Devon — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:15:10 +0000

Stephan,

in the find and replace dialog, there is a checkbox on the bottom left for “Regular Expression” which lets you use regex in the find and replace.

By: Stephan

Stephan — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:38:15 +0000

Hi,

Sorry for dummy question, but where to use the regex in text mate?? I tried in search and replace, but no go there??? Thanks for help!

By: Gite

Gite — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:30:45 +0000

Chiming in a bit late here, but I found that the previous syntaxes either did not work in BBEdit Pro or occasionally selected across duplicate instances of the offending appointment and mistakenly erased legitimate calendar entries.

The following syntax fixed the problem for me and got rid of 52,000 duplicate calendar entries that were fouling up my MobileMe sync and draining my iPhone’s battery! I’m back to 2 solid days of usage between charges!

(^BEGIN:VEVENT)([^ ]*)(Name of bad iCal entry)([^ ]*)(^END:VEVENT$)

By: Devon

Devon — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:53:16 +0000

If you have trouble with the regexes on this page, I’ve created a simpler way to clean your iCal files!

http://digitalsanctuary.com/tech-files/ical-cleaner.php

You should be able to upload your .ics file, enter one or more unique terms which are only found in the event you wish to be purged, and then hit submit.

You should get a page back that has a cleaned version of your calendar file. Click “View Source” and copy that into a new .ics file by way of your favorite text editor, such as TextMate. Always keep a backup, as I haven’t tested the online cleaner very thoroughly yet!

By: Devon

Devon — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:24:41 +0000

Well, Latin stumped me for two semesters so don’t feel badly:) You can e-mail it to me at devon@digitalsanctuary.com and I’ll take a look.

By: Edward

Edward — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:45:30 +0000

Devon,

I’ve tried with just (Birthday) – doesn’t work for me. Then again, I’m clueless about these things – I’m a Greek & Latin teacher, heh.

I don’t mind you looking at my ics file at all! How do I get it over to you? Many thanks in advance!

Edward

By: Devon

Devon — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:18:14 +0000

Edward,

it could be an issue special characters (: or ‘) making the regex unhappy. Can you try with just (Birthday) in there?

I can take a look, but I’m not sure if you want a stranger looking at your iCal file or not:)

Devon

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:35:03 +0000

Hi! I have one of these problems – I looked in the ics file and three birthdays I’d deleted years ago had somehow replicated themselves and made over 7000 entries of themselves. Funny thing is, they don’t appear when the calendar is loaded in iCal. Most of my calendars are less than 50k in size, but this calendar is now 2.8M and I’m not quite that busy a man. Ironically, one of the birthdays is that of an acrimonious ex (talk about continuing annoyance). I’ve tried opening the ics file in TextMate and BBEdit, but neither of the two search regexes seem to work for me – I keep getting a ‘nothing found’, even though I’ve put the whole confounded ‘SUMMARY:Whoever’s Birthday’ into the (SearchTextHere) field. Any suggestions? It’s making my iSync take three hours!

By: Devon

Devon — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:04:30 +0000

Cool, thank you!

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:31:43 +0000

This was very helpful. Thanks for posting this. In case it helps someone else (or if I find myself searching for this again), I had to modify it work on my ICS file… Here’s the regex I used in TextMate:

(^BEGIN:VEVENT$)([^\t]*?)(searchTextHere)([^\t]*?)(^END:VEVENT$)

Thanks again!