Question

I have tried a lot of methods, nothing worked for me. The code below shows the ndefmessage but it is not in a readable format. It displays some ndef message format as b@15d…

public void onNewIntent(Intent intent) {
  Tag myTag = (Tag)intent.getParcelableExtra(NfcAdapter.EXTRA_TAG);
  def ndefTag = Ndef.get(myTag);
  int size = ndefTag.getMaxSize();         // tag size
  String type = ndefTag.getType();         // tag type
  NdefMessage ndefMesg = ndefTag.getCachedNdefMessage();
  NdefRecord[] ndefRecords = ndefMesg.getRecords();
  int len = ndefRecords.length;
  for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    typ = ndefRecords[i].getType();
    payload = ndefRecords[i].getPayload();
  }
  String textEncoding = ((payload[0] & 0200) == 0) ? "UTF-8" : "UTF-16";
  int languageCodeLength = payload[0] & 0077;
  try {
    @SuppressWarnings("unused")
    String languageCode = new String(payload, 1,languageCodeLength,"US-ASCII");
  } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
  }
  try {
    text =new String(payload,languageCodeLength+1,payload.length
      -languageCodeLength - 1, textEncoding);
    Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
      text+"First Try",Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    mText.setText("Discovered tag "+text);
  } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
    String val = new String(typ);
    val+=new String(payload);
    Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
      "Second"+val,Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
  }
  Log.i("Foreground dispatch", "Discovered tag with intent: " + intent);
  mText.setText("Discovered tag "+text);
}

Answer 1

The payload of an NdefRecord is not necessarily a String.

You need to look at the Type Name Format (TNF) and the Type to determine how to decode the payload.

If you’ve encoded a String in the payload when you wrote the tag new String(record.getPayload()) will work fine.

If you’ve written a plain text tag with some other software, it is probably tnf TNF_WELL_KNOWN type RTD_TEXT. In that case the payload byte array will contain the language code as the first byte of the String. See http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/NFCDemo/src/com/example/android/nfc/record/TextRecord.html for an example on how to parse the payload.