Standards/mecard
MeCard
Overview
MeCard is a compact contact-card text format that is encoded inside a standard QR Code symbol so a phone can read a person's details and add them to its address book. It was created by the Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo for QR-code use on cellular phones, and is "a data file similar to vCard" but deliberately terser to fit comfortably in a small QR symbol 2.
A MeCard payload is a single line beginning with MECARD: and ending with two semicolons (;;), with each property written as a TAG:value; pair 2. Its importance beyond contacts is structural: the WIFI: network-join syntax (see WiFi QR) is a direct descendant of MeCard's grammar and escaping rules 1.
History
MeCard was developed by NTT DoCoMo in Japan for sharing business-card details via QR codes on cellular phones, in the era of DoCoMo's i-mode mobile-internet ecosystem where QR adoption was already widespread 2. The format was never published as an ISO standard or an RFC; there is "no place on the web that defines a standard for MeCard," and the original NTT DoCoMo page that defined the layout has long returned a 404 2.
The convention survived because it was documented and implemented by the ZXing project as part of its "Barcode Contents" formats, and because the WIFI: QR syntax adopted MeCard's grammar wholesale 1. The format was later recognized within the Open Mobile Alliance's Mobile Codes work as a known recognizable format 2.
Technical specification
ZXing's canonical example is 1:
MECARD:N:Owen,Sean;ADR:76 9th Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10011;TEL:12125551212;EMAIL:srowen@example.com;;
The record starts with MECARD: and ends with ;;; fields are separated by a single semicolon (;) and within a field the tag and value are separated by a colon (:) 2. MeCard is UTF-8 based (ASCII-compatible) 2. Documented tags include 2:
| Tag | Meaning |
|---|---|
N |
Name — mandatory; written last,first |
SOUND |
Phonetic (kana) reading of the name |
TEL |
Telephone number |
TEL-AV |
Videophone number |
EMAIL |
Email address |
NOTE |
Memo / free text |
BDAY |
Birthday, 8 digits (YYYYMMDD) |
ADR |
Address |
URL |
Website |
NICKNAME |
Nickname |
Escaping follows the same rule the WIFI: format borrowed from MeCard: the special characters \, ;, ,, " and : are escaped with a leading backslash 1. Only the N field is mandatory; the format's design goal is to use as few characters as possible given the size limit of a QR Code 2.
Use cases
- Compact digital contacts. MeCard carries the most-used contact fields (name, phone, email, address) in the fewest characters, producing smaller QR codes that are "easier to scan and print" than the equivalent vCard 2.
- Business cards and phone-to-phone exchange. Its origin was sharing keitai (cellphone) business-card details by QR in Japan 2.
- Camera-native add-contact. Like vCard, MeCard payloads are recognized by general-purpose QR scanners and surface an "add contact" action 2.
Implementations
| Project | Lang | Stars | Last active | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| zxing/zxing | Java | ~34k | 2025 | Reference parser; its "Barcode Contents" page is the most-cited MeCard definition 1 5 |
| qrcode-library (readthedocs) | PHP | — | — | Documents and generates MeCard payloads 4 |
Comparison
- MeCard vs vCard. vCard is the richer, IETF-standardized format (see vCard QR) with typed parameters, photos and many properties; MeCard is the compact NTT DoCoMo format that carries only the common fields and therefore "needs very few chars," yielding smaller, more scannable codes 2.
- MeCard vs WiFi QR. Same family: the
WIFI:payload reuses MeCard'sTAG:value;;structure and backslash-escaping, applied to network credentials instead of contacts 1.
Fun facts
- There is no canonical specification for MeCard anywhere on the web — not ISO, not an RFC — and the original NTT DoCoMo definition page has returned a 404 for years; the format is effectively defined by ZXing's documentation and by implementers 2.
- Despite being undefined on paper, MeCard's grammar became the template for the worldwide WiFi-sharing QR format, making a vanished Japanese contact spec the ancestor of one of the most-scanned QR types today 1 2.
Status
Niche but alive. MeCard remains widely supported by smartphone QR readers as a compact contact format, even though it never received a formal standard, and its grammar lives on in the WIFI: convention 1 2.
Sources
1 Barcode Contents — ZXing Wiki 2 MeCard (QR code) — Wikipedia 4 Me card — QrCode Library docs 5 zxing/zxing — ZXing project, GitHub
Deployments
No country reports mention this standard by name.
Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country
- Universal