QR Code encoding and decoding using zxing

For what it's worth, my groovy spike seems to work with both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 character encodings. Not sure what will happen when a non zxing decoder tries to decode the UTF-8 encoded image though... probably varies depending on the device.

// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Requires: groovy-1.7.6, jdk1.6.0_03, ./lib with zxing core-1.7.jar, javase-1.7.jar 
// Javadocs: http://zxing.org/w/docs/javadoc/overview-summary.html
// Run with: groovy -cp "./lib/*" zxing.groovy
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

import com.google.zxing.*
import com.google.zxing.common.*
import com.google.zxing.client.j2se.*

import java.awt.image.BufferedImage
import javax.imageio.ImageIO

def class zxing {
    def static main(def args) {
        def filename = "./qrcode.png"
        def data = "This is a test to see if I can encode and decode this data..."
        def charset = "UTF-8" //"ISO-8859-1" 
        def hints = new Hashtable<EncodeHintType, String>([(EncodeHintType.CHARACTER_SET): charset])

        writeQrCode(filename, data, charset, hints, 100, 100)

        assert data == readQrCode(filename, charset, hints)
    }

    def static writeQrCode(def filename, def data, def charset, def hints, def width, def height) {
        BitMatrix matrix = new MultiFormatWriter().encode(new String(data.getBytes(charset), charset), BarcodeFormat.QR_CODE, width, height, hints)
        MatrixToImageWriter.writeToFile(matrix, filename.substring(filename.lastIndexOf('.')+1), new File(filename))
    }

    def static readQrCode(def filename, def charset, def hints) {
        BinaryBitmap binaryBitmap = new BinaryBitmap(new HybridBinarizer(new BufferedImageLuminanceSource(ImageIO.read(new FileInputStream(filename)))))
        Result result = new MultiFormatReader().decode(binaryBitmap, hints)

        result.getText()        
    }

}

this is my working example Java code to encode QR code using ZXing with UTF-8 encoding, please note: you will need to change the path and utf8 data to your path and language characters

package com.mypackage.qr;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.CharBuffer;
import java.nio.charset.CharacterCodingException;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.nio.charset.CharsetEncoder;
import java.util.Hashtable;

import com.google.zxing.EncodeHintType;
import com.google.zxing.MultiFormatWriter;
import com.google.zxing.client.j2se.MatrixToImageWriter;
import com.google.zxing.common.*;

public class CreateQR {

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    Charset charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
    CharsetEncoder encoder = charset.newEncoder();
    byte[] b = null;
    try {
        // Convert a string to UTF-8 bytes in a ByteBuffer
        ByteBuffer bbuf = encoder.encode(CharBuffer.wrap("utf 8 characters - i used hebrew, but you should write some of your own language characters"));
        b = bbuf.array();
    } catch (CharacterCodingException e) {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    }

    String data;
    try {
        data = new String(b, "UTF-8");
        // get a byte matrix for the data
        BitMatrix matrix = null;
        int h = 100;
        int w = 100;
        com.google.zxing.Writer writer = new MultiFormatWriter();
        try {
            Hashtable<EncodeHintType, String> hints = new Hashtable<EncodeHintType, String>(2);
            hints.put(EncodeHintType.CHARACTER_SET, "UTF-8");
            matrix = writer.encode(data,
            com.google.zxing.BarcodeFormat.QR_CODE, w, h, hints);
        } catch (com.google.zxing.WriterException e) {
            System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }

        // change this path to match yours (this is my mac home folder, you can use: c:\\qr_png.png if you are on windows)
                String filePath = "/Users/shaybc/Desktop/OutlookQR/qr_png.png";
        File file = new File(filePath);
        try {
            MatrixToImageWriter.writeToFile(matrix, "PNG", file);
            System.out.println("printing to " + file.getAbsolutePath());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        System.out.println(e.getMessage());
    }
}

}

So, for future reference for anybody who doesn't want to spend two days searching the internet to figure this out, when you encode byte arrays into QR Codes, you have to use the ISO-8859-1character set, not UTF-8.