How can I use PHP to dynamically publish an ical file to be read by Google Calendar?

Question

Any Google search on PHP ical just brings up phpicalendar and how to parse or read IN ical files. I just want to write a PHP file that pulls events from my database and writ

Answer 1

A note of personal experience in addition to both Stefan Gehrig's answer and Dave None's answer (and mmmshuddup's reply):

I was having validation problems using both \n and PHP_EOL when I used the ICS validator at http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/

I learned I had to use \r\n in order to get it to validate properly, so this was my solution:

function dateToCal($timestamp) {
  return date('Ymd\Tgis\Z', $timestamp);
}

function escapeString($string) {
  return preg_replace('/([\,;])/','\\\$1', $string);
}    

    $eol = "\r\n";
    $load = "BEGIN:VCALENDAR" . $eol .
    "VERSION:2.0" . $eol .
    "PRODID:-//project/author//NONSGML v1.0//EN" . $eol .
    "CALSCALE:GREGORIAN" . $eol .
    "BEGIN:VEVENT" . $eol .
    "DTEND:" . dateToCal($end) . $eol .
    "UID:" . $id . $eol .
    "DTSTAMP:" . dateToCal(time()) . $eol .
    "DESCRIPTION:" . htmlspecialchars($title) . $eol .
    "URL;VALUE=URI:" . htmlspecialchars($url) . $eol .
    "SUMMARY:" . htmlspecialchars($description) . $eol .
    "DTSTART:" . dateToCal($start) . $eol .
    "END:VEVENT" . $eol .
    "END:VCALENDAR";

    $filename="Event-".$id;

    // Set the headers
    header('Content-type: text/calendar; charset=utf-8');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $filename);

    // Dump load
    echo $load;

That stopped my parse errors and made my ICS files validate properly.