When I wrote this parser, my primary goal was to be able to read vCard files produced by the Mac OS X Address Book application. However, it looks like Address Book puts some weird character after every single text character in the output, in addition to some weird line endings. If you want to use .vcf files generated by the Mac OS X Address Book, you might need to massage the file in BBEdit or TextWrangler first; turn on "show invisibles" to see the offending characters, then do a search-and-replace to delete them all at once (or perhaps "Zap Gremlins").

UPDATE: David Weingart writes, "That's probably Unicode. In my extremely limited testing, it looks like in some cases you get plain vanilla ISO Latin 1, but if there are any high ascii characters in the entry, they export UTF 16 (double-byte) Unicode." Thanks, David. (Contact_Vcard_Parse does not do Unicode at this time.)

Contact_Vcard_Parse does not validate the information or formatting in the vCard (although it does decode quoted-printable text). In the spirit of "be lenient in what you accept and strict in what you produce", Contact_Vcard_Parse should be able to read just about anything from a vCard file, but it's up to you as the programmer to make sense of the data.

Contact_Vcard_Parse should work on file with any kind of line endings (Mac \r, Unix \n, and DOS \r\n) automatically. It also unfolds lines automatically, so data elements spread across multiple lines should come through OK.

If you discover a new bug or want to contribute code to Contact_Vcard_Parse, contact Paul M. Jones at pjones at ciaweb dot net; the subject line should start with [VCARD].