QR Code possible data types or standards

Question

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 1

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:

2. Calendar data - There are two formats about iCalendar (.ics) & vCalendar (.vcs). These formats can also include location, alarm, to-do items, etc. Note that these are both verbose formats and you may be better off using a short URL to an online file in the file format but the person scanning needs to have internet connectivity and be willing to trust the QR code not to be doing anything bad.

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:

4. Email address - Start with mailto:SomeOne@SomeWhere.org gives:

5. Phone number - Start with tel: e.g. tel:+1-212-555-1212 gives:

6. SMS - See the RFC 5724.

7. Plain text - Just include the text.

8. Geo location - Use the geo:lat,long,alt format URI: geo:40.71872,-73.98905,100 (100 feet above Googles offices) gives:

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;;.

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

Answer 2

Github - Zxing (Barcode Contents) has a summary.

There may or may not be a standard.

If you are looking for non-standard formats,

please update your documentation and contribute to open source.

Answer 3

Basically, QR Code returns text data that can be of any type. You can put any type of data in any string format in QR Code. It totally depends on you. You can consider it as
[NSString stringWithFormat].