Advanced Usage

This document provides a guide to advanced usage of the ical2jcal project.

Convert an online calendar to JSON

Calendar services line Nextcloud, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook can provide an link to a .ics file for your calendar.

In the example below, we convert the example calender from our project website to JSON.

curl¹wget²

curl -sL https://github.com/pycalendar/ical2jcal/raw/refs/heads/main/example.ics | ical2jcal --pretty

[
  "vcalendar",
  [
    [
      "version",
      {},
      "text",
      "2.0"
    ],
    [
      "prodid",
      {},
      "text",
      "-//pycalendar//ical2jcal//EN"
    ]
  ],
  []
]

$ wget -qO- https://github.com/pycalendar/ical2jcal/raw/refs/heads/main/example.ics | ical2jcal --pretty

[
  "vcalendar",
  [
    [
      "version",
      {},
      "text",
      "2.0"
    ],
    [
      "prodid",
      {},
      "text",
      "-//pycalendar//ical2jcal//EN"
    ]
  ],
  []
]

Filter the JSON calendar with jq

Once converted, you can filter the JSON calendar using jq³.

In this example, we only print the prodid field of the calendar.

$ ical2jcal example.ics | jq '.[1][] | select(.[0] == "prodid") | .[3]'

Output:

"-//pycalendar//ical2jcal//EN"

Here, we use jq to get all event summaries.

$ ical2jcal other-example.ics | jq '.[2][] | select(.[0] == "vevent") | .[1][] | select(.[0] == "summary") | .[3]'

Output:

"Planning meeting"

Get today's events as JSON

Given you have a calendar file as a valid jCalendar, you can use different tools to filter the calendar by date and time and use the JSON output.

ics-query⁴icalendar-events-cli⁵

jcal2ical input.jcal | ics-query at --as-calendar `` - - | ical2jcal --pretty

Output:

[
    "vcalendar",
    [
        ...
    ],
    [
        ...
    ]
]

$ jcal2ical my-calendar.jcal my-calendar.ics
$ icalendar-events-cli \
    --calendar.url file://`pwd`/my-calendar.ics \
    --filter.start-date `date +%Y-%m-%d`T00:00:00 \
    --filter.end-date `date +%Y-%m-%d`T23:59:59

Output:

{
  "filter": {
    "start-date": "2026-02-03T00:00:00+00:00",
    "end-date": "2026-02-03T23:59:59+00:00"
  },
  "events": []
}

---

1. curl website ↩

2. wget website ↩

3. jq website ↩

4. ics-query website ↩

5. icalendar-events-cli website ↩