icalendar 7.3.0 released #1718

stevepiercy · 2026-08-23T11:58:20Z

stevepiercy
Aug 23, 2026
Maintainer

The icalendar team is pleased to announce that icalendar 7.3.0 has been released.

Highlighted changes

For the complete change log, visit:
https://icalendar.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/changelog.html

Removals and deprecations

vBinary.obj is deprecated in favor of vBinary.bytes. It is retained as a lossy string view of the value for backward compatibility, and will be removed in icalendar 8.

New features

Added Alarm.new_display(), Alarm.new_audio(), and Alarm.new_email() factory methods for creating RFC 5545 Section 3.6.6 VALARM components.
Added vBinary.bytes, exposing the raw binary value of a BINARY property.
Added the ICalParsingError exception as a public API for programmatic handling of iCalendar parsing failures.
Created a script to automatically generate the windows_to_olson module from the Unicode Consortium's CLDR GitHub repository.
Added vBinary.base64data, a getter/setter for the Base64 string view of a BINARY property's value, so callers no longer need to call base64.b64encode() or base64.b64decode() manually.
Added Alarm.ACTION and AlarmTime.action access to the RFC 5545 Section 3.8.6.1 ACTION property.
Added REQUEST_STATUS property to Event, Todo, Journal, and FreeBusy with request_status parameter in new() constructors per RFC 5545 Section 3.8.8.3. I used AI to assist with this change.

Bug fixes

Values of unrecognized properties and X- properties without a VALUE parameter were altered by escaping when parsed, serialized, or converted to and from jCal, so they did not round-trip unchanged as RFC 7265 specifies. These values are now preserved verbatim.
Avoid folding content lines between escape prefixes and their escaped characters.
Added the missing BINARY member to icalendar.enums.VALUE, per RFC 5545 Section 3.2.20.

Documentation

Revised the security policy to use GitHub Security Advisory procedure instead of emailing the Plone security team, and clarified language.
Revised how to document parameters in docstrings, specifically their order of appearance and usage of type hints. Revised guidance to write docstrings only for a class, and not their init or new methods.
Adapted pull request requirements to better handle AI slop.
Documented how to join the icalendar team.

Support icalendar

This release was made possible through the community built with the support from a NGI Zero Core grant from the NLnet Foundation as part of a larger project to develop the Python Calendaring Ecosystem.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Python-Webcalendaring/

Funding development helps create a responsive community around the Python calendaring ecosystem.
https://pycal.org/

As free and open source software, icalendar thrives and grows only when it receives support from you. You can help icalendar keep up-to-date with your platform and continue to use it in your applications in many ways.

Make a one-time or recurring financial contribution through OpenCollective at https://opencollective.com/python-icalendar.
Report security issues per https://github.com/collective/icalendar/blob/main/SECURITY.md.
Report all other issues in the issue tracker at https://github.com/collective/icalendar/issues.
Comment on and resolve issues.
Triage open issues and pull requests https://github.com/collective/icalendar/pulls.
Review, comment on, and make suggestions to change a pull request.
Submit pull requests from your fork of the icalendar repository.
Extend the documentation https://icalendar.readthedocs.io/en/stable/contribute/documentation/index.html.
Write a blog post about icalendar.
Share announcements on social media from core contributors to icalendar https://icalendar.readthedocs.io/en/stable/contribute/credits.html.

Join the icalendar community

The maintainer of icalendar, Nicco Kunzmann (GitHub: @niccokunzmann), gratefully appreciates the contributions for this release. See the list of contributors.

https://github.com/collective/icalendar/graphs/contributors

By fostering a warm and welcoming community around free and open source software, icalendar attracts both experienced and first-time contributors to participate. See how to contribute.

https://icalendar.readthedocs.io/en/stable/contribute/index.html