Description line length should not be longer than 75 characters warning in validator

[basvdijk]

When I set a large text as description, I get:

Line length should not be longer than 75 characters [near line # 44] Reference: [RFC 5545 3.1. Content Lines](http://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-1-content-lines.html)

https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-1-content-lines.html describes that lines should be broken into pieces of 75 chars.

Before using this library I did it manually with this function. Which might be useful:

  function foldICalLine(property, value) {
    const separator = "\n "; // The folding continuation character (newline + space)
    const maxLength = 71 - separator.length; // Maximum line length 75 as per the iCalendar spec
    let foldedLine = `${property}:${value}`; // Combine property and value

    if (foldedLine.length > maxLength) {
      let result = "";
      while (foldedLine.length > maxLength) {
        result += foldedLine.substring(0, maxLength) + separator; // Take first 75 chars and add `\n `
        foldedLine = foldedLine.substring(maxLength); // Remove processed characters
      }
      result += foldedLine; // Add any remaining part
      return result;
    }
    return foldedLine; // Return as-is if no folding is required
  }

[sebbo2002]

Which description are you talking about? Can you provide a working example that produces this invalid ical?

Usually this function should fold everything toString() outputs.

[basvdijk]

@sebbo2002 I managed to reproduce the error:

cal.createEvent({
  start: dtStart,
  end: dtEnd,
  location: "Default location",
  summary: "Test summary",
  description:
    "This is a large description with an appointment at Mart's place https://example.com/calendar/item/important-item-219384 which is not truncated correctly",
  status: "CONFIRMED",
});

Gives:

DESCRIPTION:This is a large description with an appointment at Mart's plac
 e https://example.com/calendar/item/important-item-219384 which is not tru
 ncated correctly

The first line is 79 characters long. Probably because of the apostrophe is escaped as 5 characters instead of 1.

[sebbo2002]

Okay, that escaping confuses me to be honest. Probably the same issue you have in #629. When I try you example it works completely fine with the current version:

import ical from 'ical-generator'

const cal = ical();
const dtStart = new Date();
const dtEnd = new Date();

cal.createEvent({
  start: dtStart,
  end: dtEnd,
  location: "Default location",
  summary: "Test summary",
  description:
    "This is a large description with an appointment at Mart's place https://example.com/calendar/item/important-item-219384 which is not truncated correctly",
  status: "CONFIRMED",
});

cal.toString();

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//sebbo.net//ical-generator//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:7e271a95-594a-4c6b-be11-6d0553f0c91c
SEQUENCE:0
DTSTAMP:20250104T162106Z
DTSTART:20250104T162106Z
DTEND:20250104T162106Z
SUMMARY:Test summary
LOCATION:Default location
DESCRIPTION:This is a large description with an appointment at Mart's plac
 e https://example.com/calendar/item/important-item-219384 which is not tru
 ncated correctly
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Are you using the current ical-generator version v8.0.1 or maybe some old, unfixed version? Is there some code in between that may add that html encoding? Because neither escape() nor foldLines() does any HTML encoding.

[basvdijk]

I am using 11ty and it turned out to escape the output. Thank you so much for your help!