Fantastically Good Event Parser

Any fans of Fantastical’s natural language entry for calendar events will like this one. Basically, I have recreated the same functionality in Drafts using JavaScript. Events can be added on multiple lines and then instantly added to the calendar, no pinging back and forth with URL schemes.

More details on my blog, and here’s a link to the action in the directory.

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I haven’t checked it out yet, but I instinctively like it because of the self-confidence shown by the name, so you’re hired.

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Outstanding! Thank you so much for creating this. Perfect for what I need!

Awesome! Looking forward to updates and anything else you might come up with.

Works beautifully. This post was picked up on my Apple News newsfeed and I installed it straight from there. I think I will be ditching fantasical too.

Had to add a comment as this action is a huge addition to my daily workflow. Thanks!

I just want you to know how awesome this action is. I use it all the time and, because of it, I am learning more about how to use Drafts. Thank you.

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I can’t believe I just discovered this (and your other excellent scripts)!

To imagine that a Drafts action could almost ‘Sherlock’ a whole other popular app, the mind boggles.

Any news @agiletortoise on if the API integration can add support for repeat field?

Hey, this is a great action. Works really well. Anyone know of a way to be able to choose a specific calendar vs. just the default?

Just write forward slash, then the first letter or two, at the end of each line, so for example /f would add to the calendar called Family.

DThat worked pretty well. I have some calendars that are two words, first word is identical but doesn’t seem to be picking the second word up for the / technique. Any suggestions for that?

Also, as a note I put “Lunch on Monday” and it added it to the previous Monday instead of the next Monday. I feel it should assume the next occurring Monday vs the past one unless I’m overlooking some other sort of use-case for why it works that way.

Does anyone know if you can use this but have it use a google calendar calendar?

This creates events using iOS/macOS APIs, which can write to any calendars you have configured on your device. If you have your Google Calendars setup in iOS Settings, it can work with them.

Ahh didn’t realize it was that simple. Thank you!!

For some reason, this is not respecting my default calendar. It is sending everything to Family which I do not even use. My default Calendar is simply called “Calendar” and if I add the /c at the end of the line, it works fine. I just don’t want to add that for every line. Any ideas?

Hello all, just to let you know I’ve pushed a small update to this script which fixes an issue where dates were not being reliably assumed to be in the future.

Really not sure why this is happening. Perhaps try toggling your default calendar?

You are right that the forward slash syntax does not currently support spaces. However, it may not be the best thing for me to enable that as it could cause other issues, for example the /calendar would always have to be at the end otherwise anything that comes after would be interpreted as part of the name of the calendar.

The issue with events being created in the past should now have been fixed. Please re-install from the Action Directory.

I love the script and rely on it for adding stuff to my iPhone calendar. Unfortunately, it seems to be broken after the recent app (or iOS) update. I get the following error message:

Script Error: ReferenceError: Can’t find variable: chrono
Line number: 13, Column 12

Any thoughts?

@mlamberth this is being discussed already in the following topic.