In one of my projects I suddenly needed to generate QR code. I tried searching for some free QR Code generator Library, but didn’t find anything suitable and reliable except the PEAR package which I had used many years back. I was not willing to use the package as the last Alpha release was about 9 years ago. But as there were no suitable package so ultimately used that. The PHP version is 7.2.34.

Using the library is simple and pretty straightforward

Installation:

$pear install channel://pear.php.net/Image_QRCode-0.1.3

PHP Code

require_once './Image_QRCode-0.1.3/Image/QRCode.php';

$qrcode = new Image_QRCode();

$options = array( "image_type" => "png", "output_type" => "return" );

$gd_object = $qrcode->makeCode("STRING", $options);

$sx = imagesx($gd_object);

$sy = imagesy($gd_object);

//The returned object is an "image resource". Which can be saved as an image or can be used as a watermark. Below example is of watermarking which will placed at the bottom right on the main image
//imagesx($im) - $sx === the x position where the qr code will be placed
//imagesy($im) - $sy === the y position where the qr code will be placed
//0, 0 == the start point from where the QRCode image will start to be be copied - 0,0 means from the top left or start of the image - if some other value is given then it will be cropped
//imagesx($gd_object), imagesy($gd_object), == the end point of the qr code image. The current copies upto the bottom right or end point of the image. Any value lesser will cause a cropped image. //75 == is the quality of the overall image.

$im = imagecreatefromstring($data);  // imagecreatefrompng($filename)

imagecopymerge($im, $gd_object, imagesx($im) - $sx, imagesy($im) - $sy, 0, 0, imagesx($gd_object), imagesy($gd_object), 75);

ob_start(); //Turn on output buffering

imagepng($im); //Generate your image

$outputImage = ob_get_contents(); // get the image as a string in a variable

ob_end_clean(); //Turn off output buffering and clean

file_put_contents("IMAGE.PNG",$outputImage);