ZBar upstream considers that the output should be done in utf-8. Yet, it
has a limited support for charset conversions, supporting "UTF-8", "ISO8859-1",
"SJIS" and "BIG-5".
Its decoding logic tries to detect the original charset and do the conversion.
Sometimes, it may guess things wrong, though.
Due to that, ZBar also supports a raw mode, where the charset conversion
is disabled:
$ gpg --export 5EA01078| ascii85| head -10 > orig && cat orig |
qrencode -8 -o key.png && ./zbarimg/zbarimg --oneshot --raw key.png >parsed &&
diff -s orig parsed
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0.05 seconds
Files orig and parsed are identical
So, if the decoding is not converting things right, you can simply use
-raw mode and call "iconv" utility by hand, in order to manually do the
charset conversion manually.
Thanks,
Mauro
