Wednesday, October 7, 2009

How to import a yahoo agenda to another (yahoo) account ?

Even if this post is written in English, it targets French people. As a French, I use the French yahoo web site, which is slightly different from the American version.

EXPORT

In France, you do not have access to Import/Export functions. You need to go to your Agenda options and hack the url. The url has two parameters v (id of current page) and pv (id of previous page). You must change the v value to 81. Thanks a lot BarrJo for this info.

This will show a new page with Import/Export functions to/from Palm Desktop and Outlook.

Simply export in Outlook format.

PATCH & IMPORT

The exported agenda cannot be handled by yahoo (this might explain why yahoo hides this functionnality).

Here is what you need to fix :
  • Carriage returns : all carriage returns are missing. You must add one after the header line (just after the "Description" title). You can deal most of the lines with a decent text editor with search and replace (you need to add a new line after "true";"" or "false";""). Then, only the rows with a non-empty description remain.
  • HTML entities : for example, ", & and ', etc. must be respectively replaced by ", & and '.
  • Commas : Yahoo gives you a file with values separated by semicolons. You need to replace them with commas. Be careful of other semicolons (in descriptions for example).
Now you can import the patched csv file.

Note : I have exported again the imported agenda and checked that all events were taken into account. I have just noticed a few updates from true to false in the antelast column.

LIMITS
  • Some yahoo specific info is lost (kind of event defaults to meeting, reminder, etc.)
  • Repetitions are lost : if you update the repetition period of an event, you will end with two events in the future (the imported one and the repetition). So I advise you to remove all repetition starting from next year for yearly events (like birthdays). Then you will just need to set the repetition period to all birthdays.
OTHER POSSIBLE BUGS
  • Date formats
  • Encoding : UTF8 / ANSI / etc.

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