1

An online calendar file (.ics) that I am trying to import happens to be in the latin1 encoding rather than UTF-8. I added the calendar to Thunderbird's Lightning extension, but none of the events show up. A yellow triangular "warning" icon shows up next to the calendar name, with the hover text "The calendar name is momentarily not available.". On the error console I read

Warning: There has been an error reading data for calendar: name. Error code: CAL_UTF8_DECODING_FAILED. Description: An error occured while decoding an iCalendar (ics) file as UTF-8. Check that the file, including symbols and accented letters, is encoded using the UTF-8 character encoding.

Warning: There has been an error reading data for calendar: name. Error code: READ_FAILED. Description:

both pointing to the source file calendar-js/calCalendarManager.js in my default profile's extension folder, line 962.

Tests with local ics files confirm that the issue is absent when the file is in UTF-8 rather than latin1. How can I get the events in the ics file to appear in Lightning? Since the file is online and will be updated, I would prefer a solution that does not require me to download and convert the file to UTF-8 every time.

One solution could be to edit the Javascript file to allow non-UTF-8 calendars, but the documentation of the Unicode converter used is too sparse for me to succeed in a reasonable time.

1
  • I have the same problem right now. This problem seems to be well known since many years. (There are bug reports open since 2008 but no one seems to fix it.) It would be really great if this could be fixed. Up to now I found no solution but manually editing. I even tried "sunbird" - with the exact same error. So it is not just a Lightning problem. I even converted to .csv and tried to import afterwards - no chance. Converter used: projectwizards.net/de/support/ics2csv
    – Peterling
    Oct 9, 2016 at 17:57

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .