There are two issues that you have to overcome to store binary data in QR codes. And actually, not all decoders support ECI. Maybe the reason behind it is that no one wants to waste these precious bytes adding an ECI mode specifying UTF-8. Which according to the QR code standard, is what should be done when there is no ECI mode defined.īut in practice, most smartphone QR code reader will interpret it as UTF-8 in this case (or at least try to auto-detect the encoding).Įven though this is not the standard, this had become common practice:īinary mode with no ECI, UTF-8 encoded text. Now about interpreting the QR code binary data as text, you said the first character should be 'Ñ' which is true if interpreted it as 'ISO-8859-1', So the solution is to use a decoder that will output you the binary data, and not text data. Even if you think you can convert it from text to binary, as you saw this may cause issues with values which are not valid text. But since it's binary data, you should not try to handle it as text. Because most decoders will try to interpret it as text. You can see the binary data from zxing is what you would expect: 4: Byte mode indicator 'What is going on? Are any of these correct?'Įxcept for the google chart (which is just empty), your QR codes are correct. So it seems like the issue is with ZXing (which is surprisingly shit - I wouldn't recommend it to anyone). It scans both JS versions ok (at least they start with ÑP). It occurred to me to try scanning them with a ZBar-based scanner app I found. What is going on? Are any of these correct? What's really weird is that if I encode this sequence (with the JS ones at least) then it works fine - I would have thought the issue was non-ASCII characters but Ñ ( 0xd1) is non-ASCII. The two javascript ones produce this (it's wrong the first text character should be Ñ. Here is what I want to encode (hex): d1 50 01 00 00 00 f6 5f 05 2d 8f 0b 40 e2 01ĭecoding with produces various incorrect results. Apparently QR codes do support storing raw binary data (or ISO-8859-1 / Latin1). I'm trying to store binary data in a QR code.

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