UnicodeDecodeError when parsing ical with non-ASCII characters in UID

[pomeloy]

icalparser.py crashes on trying to parse an ical file with non-ASCII characters in the UID field. I know, RFC 5545 3.1 says you are not supposed to do that, but IMO this should not break the parser.

icalparser.py#L208

    event.uid = component.get("uid").encode("utf-8").decode("ascii")

This obviously fails with a non-ASCII character.

I am not exactly sure why the encoding/decoding is necessary, but either removing this or adding a try-except block defaulting to str(uuid4()) would fix this. Did I miss something here?

[mbafford]

I stated encountering this for my use-case a few days ago as well.

In my case the UID value is:

b'\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd\xef\xbf\xbd'

I'm syncing to Google Calendar with https://github.com/andrewramsay/ical_to_gcal_sync so I need unique and reliable ID values. So instead of using a uuid(), I added a hash of the DTSTAMP and SUMMARY values:

    uid = None
    if component.get("uid"):
        try:
            uid = component.get("uid").encode("utf-8").decode("ascii")
        except UnicodeDecodeError as ex:
            pass
    
    if not uid:
        import hashlib
        uid = hashlib.md5((
            str(component.get("dtstamp").dt.timestamp()) +
            str(component.get("summary"))
        ).encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()

    event.uid = uid

I don't know how reliable this will be, but in my case it'll mean those two values have to change which will result in a delete+recreate on Google Calendar but the overall end-state will be the same. As long as I minimize that with a non-random UID, it's good for me.

The broken event looks like this:

BEGIN:VEVENT
DESCRIPTION:\nNOTE: This is a Multi customer booking. Log into Bookings to 
 see customer information and notes for this event.\n\nBooking Info\n------
 --------------REDACTED\n\nManage booking\n
-------------------------------------\n<URL>\n\nLearn more
  https://aka.ms/JoinTeamsMeeting\n
UID:����
SUMMARY:Appointment
DTSTART;TZID=Eastern Standard Time:20231201T173000
DTEND;TZID=Eastern Standard Time:20231201T180000
CLASS:PUBLIC
PRIORITY:5
DTSTAMP:20231214T000000Z
TRANSP:OPAQUE
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SEQUENCE:3
LOCATION:
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-APPT-SEQUENCE:3
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-INTENDEDSTATUS:BUSY
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-ALLDAYEVENT:FALSE
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-INSTTYPE:0
X-MICROSOFT-DONOTFORWARDMEETING:FALSE
X-MICROSOFT-DISALLOW-COUNTER:FALSE
X-MICROSOFT-REQUESTEDATTENDANCEMODE:DEFAULT
X-MICROSOFT-ISRESPONSEREQUESTED:FALSE
END:VEVENT