QR Codes now available on the Google Chart API
By Hiroyuki
Komatsu, Google Chart API team
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.
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".)