Pythons Project for beginners - Post 42: QR Code Generator

Let's build a QR Code Generator. This is a very practical and modern project that's surprisingly easy for beginners. It introduces how to use external Python libraries to create useful image files.

First, here is the explanation of how the project is built.

How the "QR Code Generator" is Made

1. The Core Idea: The goal is to create a program that takes any piece of text or a URL from the user and generates a QR code image from it, which can then be scanned by a smartphone.

2. Required Modules: This project relies on an external library called qrcode. Because this library needs to create an image, it also depends on another library called Pillow. You can install both at the same time using pip in your terminal: pip install qrcode[pil]

3. Getting User Input: The program needs two things from the user:

   • The data to be encoded into the QR code (e.g., a website link, a phone number, or just plain text).

   • The filename for the output image (e.g., my_website_qr.png).

4. The Core Logic - Generating and Saving the Image:

   • Import: First, we import the qrcode library at the top of our script.

   • Generate: The qrcode library makes the process incredibly simple. We call the qrcode.make() function and pass the user's data string into it. This function handles all the complex logic of creating the QR code pattern and returns an image object.

   • Save: The image object returned by qrcode.make() has a .save() method. We simply call this method and pass the user's desired filename to it. This will save the QR code as an image file (like a PNG) in the same directory where you run the script.

5. Adding Confirmation: After the file is successfully saved, it's good practice to print a confirmation message to the user, telling them that the QR code has been generated and what the filename is. We can wrap the core logic in a try...except block to catch any potential errors during the process and inform the user if something went wrong.