Dynamically generating a QR code with PHP

Question

I'm trying to generate QR codes on my website. All they have to do is have a URL in them, which a variable on my site will provide. What would be the easiest way to do this?

Answer 1

It's worth adding that, in addition to the QR codes library posted by @abaumg, Google provides a QR Codes API QR Codes API^{many thanks to @Toukakoukan for the link update}.

To use this, basically:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=300x300&cht=qr&chl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&choe=UTF-8

• 300x300 is the size of the QR image you want to generate,
• the chl is the url-encoded string you want to change into a QR code, and
• the choe is the (optional) encoding.

The link, above, gives more detail, but to use it just have the src of an image point to the manipulated value, like so:

<img src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=300x300&cht=qr&chl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&choe=UTF-8" title="Link to Google.com" />

Demo:

Answer 2

The easiest way to generate QR codes with PHP is the phpqrcode library.

Answer 3

The endroid/QrCode library is easy to use, well maintained, and can be installed using composer. There is also a bundle to use directly with Symfony.

Installing :

$ composer require endroid/qrcode

Usage :

<?php

use Endroid\QrCode\QrCode;

$qrCode = new QrCode();
$qrCode
    ->setText('Life is too short to be generating QR codes')
    ->setSize(300)
    ->setPadding(10)
    ->setErrorCorrection('high')
    ->setForegroundColor(array('r' => 0, 'g' => 0, 'b' => 0, 'a' => 0))
    ->setBackgroundColor(array('r' => 255, 'g' => 255, 'b' => 255, 'a' => 0))
    ->setLabel('Scan the code')
    ->setLabelFontSize(16)
    ->setImageType(QrCode::IMAGE_TYPE_PNG)
;

// now we can directly output the qrcode
header('Content-Type: '.$qrCode->getContentType());
$qrCode->render();

// or create a response object
$response = new Response($qrCode->get(), 200, array('Content-Type' => $qrCode->getContentType()));

Answer 4

The phpqrcode library is really fast to configure and the API documentation is easy to understand.

In addition to abaumg's answer I have attached 2 examples in PHP from http://phpqrcode.sourceforge.net/examples/index.php

1. QR code encoder

first include the library from your local path

include('../qrlib.php');

then to output the image directly as PNG stream do for example:

QRcode::png('your texte here...');

to save the result locally as a PNG image:

$tempDir = EXAMPLE_TMP_SERVERPATH;

$codeContents = 'your message here...';

$fileName = 'qrcode_name.png';

$pngAbsoluteFilePath = $tempDir.$fileName;
$urlRelativeFilePath = EXAMPLE_TMP_URLRELPATH.$fileName;

QRcode::png($codeContents, $pngAbsoluteFilePath); 

2. QR code decoder

See also the zxing decoder:

http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx

Pretty useful to check the output.

3. List of Data format

A list of data format you can use in your QR code according to the data type :

• Website URL: http://stackoverflow.com (including the protocole http://)
• email address: mailto:name@example.com
• Telephone Number: +16365553344 (including country code)
• SMS Message: smsto:number:message
• MMS Message: mms:number:subject
• YouTube Video: youtube://ID (may work on iPhone, not standardized)

Answer 5

qrcode-generator on Github. Simplest script and works like charm.

Pros:

• No third party dependency
• No limitations for the number of QR code generations

Answer 6

I know the question is how to generate QR codes using PHP, but for others who are looking for a way to generate codes for websites doing this in pure javascript is a good way to do it. The jquery-qrcode jquery plugin does it well.

Answer 7

I have been using google qrcode api for sometime, but I didn't quite like this because it requires me to be on the Internet to access the generated image.

I did a little comand-line research and found out that linux has a command line tool qrencode for generating qr-codes.

I wrote this little script. And the good part is that the generated image is less than 1KB in size. Well the supplied data is simply a url.

$url = ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] ? "https://" : "http://").$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/profile.php?id='.$_GET['pid'];
$img = shell_exec('qrencode --output=- -m=1 '.escapeshellarg($url));

$imgData = "data:image/png;base64,".base64_encode($img);

Then in the html I load the image:

<img class="emrQRCode" src="<?=$imgData ?>" />

You just need to have installed it. [most imaging apps on linux would have installed it under the hood without you realizing.