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's TAG: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