QR codes are slowly, slowly gaining more traction, despite the fact that they are pretty much only useful little beasts when it comes to directing smartphone users to some or other web content URL. Generating them is pretty easy, hell, even Google Chart has an api for them, and to decode them you simply need a phone with a camera and a decoder app installed. But what if you don’t have a phone for testing and simply want to check that your generated QR code is correct?

Well for that you need a desktop decoder, or in our case an online decoder. Enter the poorly named ZXing project (Apparently this stands for Zebra Crossing), which is dedicated to producing a multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library, implemented in Java.

Anyway, they have released a very handy online decoder that allows you to either submit an URL or upload an image containing a valid QR code, which it will then decode and return its encoded contents for.

Very, very nifty.

The decoder can be found at: http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx