QR Codes now available on the Google Chart API
By Hiroyuki
Komatsu, Google Chart API team![](https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-developer-goog-blog-assets/images_archive/original_images/qrcode_X0TvCFf.png)
You can easily
render 2D bar codes, known as
QR
Codes, with the
Google Chart
API, along with pie charts and bar graphs. If you haven't seen a QR Code before, you
are looking at one on the right hand side (To see more, do an image search for "
QR Code".)
QR Codes are a popular type of two-dimensional barcode. You can encode URLs, contact
information, etc. into a black-and-white image like the one on the right. A QR-Code-enabled
device can later scan the image and read back the original text. Learn more about QR Codes
from
Google Print
Ads. If you don't have a reader Google also offers a QR Code decoder library:
Zebra Crossing (ZXing).
This is how you can creating these with the Google Chart API:
Simply, there is a new chart type,
qr
, with attributes to tell the service what to produce:
cht=qr
chl=<text>
choe=<output>
<text> is text for the QR code. This
must be url-encoded in UTF8. Note the space between
hello
and
world
is written as
%20
in the following
example.
<output> optionally specifies how the text is encoded into
bytes in the QR Code. If this is not specified the default of
UTF-8
is used. Available options are:
Shift_JIS
,
UTF-8
, or
ISO-8859-1
.
For the details, please
read the full documentation.