QR Code possible data types or standards

Irfan DANISH picture Irfan DANISH · Nov 11, 2013 · Viewed 11.7k times · Source

I am developing an iOS Application for scanning QR Codes. I am successfully able to scan and get code from QR code.

Question:

My question is what are possible data types and format I can expect from QR Codes?

During my search on google I found QR Code can be used for

  1. Contact data
  2. Calendar data
  3. URL
  4. Email address
  5. Phone number
  6. SMS
  7. Plain text
  8. Geo location

Is this the complete list and is there same standard to represent above data in QR Codes? Means same way of generating QR Code for above QR types.

Is there any standard way of generating and representing data in QR Code?

Answer

Steve Barnes picture Steve Barnes · Nov 4, 2014

Basically your text information has to be identifiable for what it is:

There is a very good summary here.

  1. Contact data - use MeCard, or vCard (much more verbose), e.g.: MECARD:Surname, First;ADR:123 Some St., Town, Zip Code, Country;EMAIL:some_name@some_ip.com;TEL:+11800123123;BDAY:19550231;; Gives: ExampleMeCard

  2. Calendar data - No standard seems to be set yet

  3. URL: Start your url with the standard format specifier such as http://, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19900835/qr-code-possible-data-types-or-standards Gives: ExampleUrl

  4. Email address - Start with mailto:[email protected] gives: Example Mail To

  5. Phone number - Start with tel: e.g. tel:+1-212-555-1212 gives: Example Tel No

  6. SMS - See the RFC 5724.

  7. Plain text - Just include the text. Example Text
  8. Geo location - Use the geo:lat,long,alt format URI: geo:40.71872,-73.98905,100 (100 feet above Googles offices) gives: Example Geolocation
  9. WIFI - (ssid is 'abc' and password is '1234'). For WEP encryption: WIFI:S:abc;T:WEP;P:1234;;. For WPA/WPA2: WIFI:S:abc;T:WPA;P:1234;;. Without encryption: WIFI:S:abc;T:nopass;P:1234;;. Example WIFI NoPass

All the above example were generated with the Python qrcode package from the command line.