Downloading a favourited calendar ICS for JuliaCon2023

JuliaConFavsICS.md

Guide

I couldn't find a way to download only my favourited talks, so I wrote a script, found in this gist. Below are instructions of how to use it for yourself.

1. Go to https://pretalx.com/juliacon2023/schedule/ to choose your schedule and favourite the talks you want in your calendar.
2. Next, go to the cookies page by opening up the dev tools (usually F12). I found my favourited talks on Firefox in Storage -> Local Storage -> "juliacon2023_favs" and copied the JSON array directly in the script.
3. Paste in the array found in the cookies to your copy of the file below.
4. Download your ICS calendar file by clicking the down arrow next to the Version number in the same folder as the script downloaded. I called my file "schedule.ics".
5. Run the script with your favourited list and you should get a new file called "my_schedule.ics". Check to see if the talks are the ones you want.
6. Download the ICS to your phone / import them to your calendar app of choice.

script.jl

function filter_schedule(schedule_file, favourites)
    output = IOBuffer()
    block_buffer = IOBuffer()
    is_in_block = false
    ignore_block = true

    open(schedule_file, "r") do f
        while !eof(f)
            line = readline(f)
            if is_in_block
                if startswith(line, "END:VEVENT")
                    is_in_block = false
                    if !ignore_block
                        println(block_buffer, line)
                        print(output, String(take!(block_buffer)))
                    else
                        take!(block_buffer)
                    end
                elseif any(contains(line, event_id) for event_id in favourites)
                    ignore_block = false
                else
                    println(block_buffer, line)
                end
            else
                if startswith(line, "BEGIN:VEVENT")
                    is_in_block = true
                    ignore_block = true
                    println(block_buffer, line)
                else
                    println(output, line)
                end
            end
        end
    end

    return String(take!(output))
end

favourited_ids = ["GTKJZL","TTAJXA"] # For example, usually much longer.
favs = Set(favourited_ids)

schedule_file = "schedule.ics"
output = filter_schedule(schedule_file, favs)

open("my_schedule.ics", "w") do f
    write(f, output)
end

Thanks, that really helped!