For my second PR, I worked on improving Unicode handling across event data, specifically addressing a bug where diacritics and accented characters were displaying incorrectly in event summaries, descriptions, and locations in Open Web Calendar project.
This issue affected international users whose calendars contained characters like á, ñ, ü, and ø. To fix this, I explored the ICS conversion process in events.py, added a normalization function using Python’s unicodedata.normalize("NFC"), and made sure it applied consistently to all text fields before being passed to the frontend. This required reading through the ICS parser, learning how the project structures event data, and testing with sample ICS files that contained accented characters to verify the fix.
Compared to my earlier assignments, this PR felt more like real open-source work, debugging a subtle data-handling issue, updating backend code, and manually validating changes across the UI. This contribution helped me get comfortable modifying a larger codebase and taught me how to approach encoding problems that don’t always produce obvious errors but have a real impact on user experience.
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