Mou某
Mou某

Reputation: 596

How many characters of plain text can a QR Code handle?

I've been playing with putting plain text into a qr code. A few paragraphs don't seem to be an issue. Longer texts, though, seem to choke up the system.

I've seen something about 300 characters giving servers issues but I'm not sure what that is based off.

How many characters of plain text can a QR Code handle?

Upvotes: 8

Views: 15588

Answers (1)

nopassport1
nopassport1

Reputation: 1944

What can be stored in a QR Code?

Up to 7089 digits or 4296 characters, including punctuation marks and special characters, can be entered in one Code. In addition to numbers and characters, words and phrases (e.g. Internet addresses) can be encoded as well. As more data is added to the QR Code, the Code size increases and the Code structure becomes more complex.

Source: https://www.qr-code-generator.com/qr-code-marketing/qr-codes-basics/


Further detail into the type of data you can store:

QR Code Data Capacity
 _______________________________________________________________
|     Input    | Max Characters |     Possible Characters       |
|______________|________________|_______________________________|
|   Numeric    |      7,089     | 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9  |
|______________|________________|_______________________________|
|              |                | 0–9, A–Z (upper-case only),   |
| Alphanumeric |      4,296     | space, $, %, *, +, -, ., /, : |
|______________|________________|_______________________________|
|    Binary    |      2,953     | ISO 8859-1 Characters         |
|______________|________________|_______________________________|
|  Kanji/kana  |      1,817     | Shift JIS / X 0208 Characters |
|______________|________________|_______________________________|

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Storage
http://qrcode.meetheed.com/question3.php

You can also find the official specification here:
https://www.iso.org/standard/62021.html

Upvotes: 10

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