[kstenerud]

Unfortunately, the QR code "binary" mode specification defaults to ISO 8859-1 for the encoding (because it was not originally intended to store actual binary data), and there's also no way to indicate what format is actually encoded. So all decoders of course just assume ISO 8859-1 because they have no way of knowing otherwise.

However, we could in theory get around this by using binary data formats that always begin with an invalid text character (such as 0x80-0x9f). This way, an implementation can know that the data is not ISO 8859-1, and try to decode whatever format it discovers through the beginning byte signature.

I've actually put this into Concise Encoding [1]

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...