rQRCode, a Ruby library for encoding QR Codes
February 24th, 2008 @ 15:37 skip to comments
[Update]
I have also posted a bit more about the upcoming QR Code work for BBC /programmes.
We implemented QR Codes on /programmes (A project I’m one of the Software Engineer’s on, at the BBC) a few weeks back. They’ve been talked about since so I won’t repeat things, only to say it was a simple implementation using a JavaScript library by Kazuhiko Arase and took all of 5 minutes of my lunch hour to add. It started as an email by colleague Michael Smethhurst asking if we could/should implement them, and was also the first I had really heard of them.
Since then, I have done lots more research and think there is great mileage there for promotional material and advertising. At the moment the codes are built on the client side, but this will be moved to the server soon so we can start caching the pages, and also so we can provide the code in a more useful format (maybe images instead of the current HTML table).
So to the point of this post. During my research to understand QR Codes more and because of the lack of readable spec (Anyone know if there is one?) I decided to reverse engineer the JavaScript library into a Ruby Gem as there didn’t seem to be one out there. This helped me understand the how QR Codes are encoded, while at the same time giving something back for other people to use.
Anyway, it’s now done and there is a rQRCode Rubyforge project setup. You can also view the rRQRCode documentation (still to be improved) or just jump straight into installing the gem.
A quick simple example in the console:
Also, here is a quick example of using it in a Ruby on Rails project:
So that should get you going. I’m have some interesting features I working on adding so expect lots of updates over the next few weeks. Enjoy!
Thanks, that was just what I needed. Thumbs for the BBC websites - one of the few major websites that doesn’t suck.
I was a little too quick. I get the follwing error:
x.each_index do |y|
undefined method `each_index’ for 0:Fixnum
to_console works.
Bernd, well spotted, sorry about that, fixed now. I was so concerned in getting the lib out I forgot about the important stuff .. doh!
Duncan,
thank you, it does work now!
Thank you for the post - I’m new at Ruby and I’m just warming up for the Ruby Conference in Copenhagen April 1
.
Many thanks for sharing this!
I couldn’t see whether the rQRCode libraries were able to produce images directly so I implemented this myself and have posted my code online: Encoding QR Codes using Ruby.
[…] A friend of mine introduced to to qr codes and blogged about it in his post about qrcodes and said they were going to be a big thing of the future. Being jealous of his Nokia n95 (before I got my Iphone) I dismissed this a bit. Yes they were cool but I did not see them as a great marketing thing until the other day. When I bumped across this article about how the bbc are looking at incorporating qrcodes . So I will have to lool into them more now I think. […]
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