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VCF Format (vCard)

Description​

VCF (vCard) is a standard format (RFC 6350) for electronic business cards. It's used to represent contact information and is supported by most email clients and address book applications. VCF files contain contact details like name, email, phone, address, etc.

File Extensions​

  • .vcf - vCard files
  • .vcard - vCard files (alias)

Implementation Details​

Reading​

The VCF implementation:

  • Uses vobject or vcard library for parsing
  • Parses vCard format
  • Extracts contact information
  • Converts each vCard to a dictionary
  • Handles vCard properties and attributes

Writing​

Writing is supported: write() and write_bulk() serialize record dictionaries back to vCard entries (requires the vobject package).

Key Features​

  • Contact format: Designed for contact information
  • Standard format: RFC 6350 standard
  • Contact extraction: Extracts contact details
  • Nested data: Supports complex contact structures
  • Multiple contacts: Can contain multiple vCards

Usage​

from iterable import open_iterable

# Basic reading
source = open_iterable('contacts.vcf')
for contact in source:
    print(contact)  # Contains contact information
source.close()

Parameters​

  • encoding (str): File encoding (default: utf8)

Limitations​

  1. Dependency: Requires vobject or vcard package (install with pip install iterabledata[vcf])
  2. Contact focus: Designed for contact data, not general data
  3. Format complexity: Complex vCard structures may require manual handling

Compression Support​

VCF files can be compressed with all supported codecs:

  • GZip (.vcf.gz)
  • BZip2 (.vcf.bz2)
  • LZMA (.vcf.xz)
  • LZ4 (.vcf.lz4)
  • ZIP (.vcf.zip)
  • Brotli (.vcf.br)
  • ZStandard (.vcf.zst)

Use Cases​

  • Contact management: Working with contact information
  • Address books: Processing address book data
  • Data migration: Migrating contact data
  • Email clients: Importing/exporting contacts
  • iCal - iCalendar format
  • EML - Email format