title: Choosing a character encoding for QR Codes
body: <p>I'm building an application which will have the ability to generate QR Codes including arbitrary text data. However, this poses a challenge: I'm expecting users to include non-ASCII characters such as á or ö.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9699657/is-utf-8-the-encoding-of-choice-for-qr-codes-with-non-ascii-chars-by-now">From what I've gathered</a>, the default for QR Codes is ISO-8859-1, but UTF-8 seems to be a common choice (and accepts a wider range of characters, such as Arabic or Hebrew characters that wouldn't be shown in ISO-8859-1).</p>
  
  <p>However, the question I've linked doesn't answer a vital question for me - can I expect most real world QR code readers (e.g., smartphones or any commonly used tools for QR reading) to reliably read QR codes with UTF-8 encoding? Is it safer to use ISO-8859-1 instead? Or should I just assume that including non-ASCII characters in QR Codes is a recipe for failure?</p>