fantastic event parser

created by @FlohGro / more on my Blog

Fantastic Event Parser

This action tries its best to parse natural language input to calendar events. As also mentioned in the Credits section, it is based on the Fantastically Good Event Parser action by @pdavisonreiber. The original action already creates events but there is no user indication or control what it actually interpreted from the inputs.
With this action every parsed event will be displayed as a prompt that you need to confirm to create the event. If you want to make any changes you can easily do that in the prompt. Once you press confirm event the event will be created in the Calendar, if you select cancel the event won’t be created and the action will move on to the next event if there is one.

The action will parse the current selection in the editor if you selected something. If no text is selected, it will parse the whole Draft. Every line in the selection / Draft will be parsed as a single event.

The parser tries to mimic Fantasticals behavior for natural language parsing. The following parameters for an event will be interpreted:
- title: in most cases this should be the beginning of the lines, everything not recognized by other patterns will be interpreted as the title
- date & time: try to write the dates as natural language (e.g. today, tomorrow, [weekday],…) the action will create a date for most of them. Of course you can just type the exact dates, too (the recognized date pattern depends on the configured language); YYYY-MM-DD format will always work. You can either add a starttime and endtime to the event (if its not all-day) or a start date followed by a duration (e.g. 2023-12-24 10:00-12:00 or 2023-12-24 10:00 for 2h)
- calendar: if you want to add the event to a specific calendar you can use a forward slash followed by the calendar name e.g. /Private
- alert: create an alert prior to the event with strings like alert 30min to create an alert 30min before the event. You can also configure the action to always create a default alert for each event. (please note: du to API limitations it is currently not possible to edit the alerts in the displayed prompt)
- location: the keywords “in” or “at” will indicate the start of a location string for the parser

Here are a few (english) example events that the parser can recognize and create for you:

Important discussion with coworkers tomorrow 9:00-11:30 /work alert 30min at Apple Park
Dinner sunday 19:00 for 3h /private at FavoritePizza
Workshop 2024-02-01 to 2024-02-03 /work at San Francisco
Call with Somebody today 17:00

If you have any questions or issues feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or in the Drafts forum.

[Configuration]

You can change the following parameters to influence the behavior of the action:
- parsing language: change the language of the date recognition (default: US)
- default alert: add a default alert prior to the created events (default: no alert)
- default calendar: set a default calendar (other than your iCloud default) with this parameter

I decided to put these configuration parameters into a Script step which hopefully makes it easier to edit for you as a user.
To change the default values of the action please edit it, open the first Script step and click/tap on edit.
You will see a lot of comments that explain what the parameter below does and what the available options are.
You only need to edit the values of the variables, don’t change their names.
E.g. to change the default parsing language from US to GB you would change line 9 in the script step to:
const language = "GB"

If you want to add a default alert 30 minutes prior to an event you would change line 16 to:
const defaultAlarmOffset = 30

To change your default calendar that the action uses to your work calendar you would change line 24 in the script step to:
const defaultCalendar = “work”

[Credits]

This action is based on the Fantastically Good Event Parser by @pdavisonreiber. Full credits to him for the parsing logic to easily create events within Drafts.
@pdavisonreiber integrated ‘chronology.min.js’ into the action which you can find here

If you find this useful and want to support me you can donate or buy me a coffee