vCard files explained: what is inside a .vcf and why 3.0 still wins

A .vcf file is plain text with a rigid shape. Every contact you have ever received as an attachment, every "add to contacts" button that worked, and every business-card QR code that put a name in your phone without a network connection is this:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Nair;Priya;;;
FN:Priya Nair
ORG:Rana Motors
TITLE:Service Manager
TEL;TYPE=CELL,VOICE:+919876543210
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET,PREF:priya@example.com
URL:https://example.com
REV:2026-09-05T09:12:44Z
END:VCARD

Ten lines, CRLF endings, and a phone will import it.

The properties that matter

N is the structured name, and its five semicolon-separated fields are always in this order: family name, given name, additional names, prefixes, suffixes. Trailing empty fields still need their semicolons — N:Nair;Priya;;; is correct and N:Nair;Priya is not.

FN is the formatted display name, and it is the one apps show. It is required in 3.0, and skipping it is the most common reason a card imports with a blank or mangled name.

TEL and EMAIL carry type parameters. TYPE=CELL,VOICE is the mobile; TYPE=WORK,VOICE is the desk phone; PREF on an email marks it as the preferred one. Phones use these to label the entries, so a card with three untyped numbers imports as three identical rows.

ADR has seven semicolon-separated fields — post office box, extended address, street, locality, region, postal code, country — and the first two are almost always empty, which is why real address lines start with two semicolons.

REV is a timestamp saying when the card was last changed. Some clients use it to decide whether an incoming card is newer than the one they already have, which makes it worth writing even though nothing enforces it.

The two rules that break files

Escaping. Inside a value, a backslash, semicolon or comma must be escaped with a backslash, and a line break is written as the two characters \n. A job title of Head of Sales, EMEA must be written as Head of Sales\, EMEA, or the comma is read as a field separator.

Folding. A line longer than 75 octets is split, with continuation lines beginning with a single space. The counting is in bytes, not characters, so a name in Devanagari or Arabic folds much sooner than a Latin one of the same visual length. Importers that mishandle folding are the reason long addresses sometimes arrive truncated.

vCard in a QR code, and where it stops working

A QR code can carry the vCard text directly. Scanners recognise the BEGIN:VCARD prefix and offer to save the contact with no network involved, which is the format's superpower at a conference with no signal.

The cost is size. A minimal card of name, mobile, email and company runs to roughly 150 to 250 bytes, which at error correction level M is a version 9 to 11 symbol — 53 to 61 modules a side. Printed at 3 cm that gives you modules of about half a millimetre, which is at the edge of what an ordinary phone camera reads reliably in poor light.

Add a postal address, a note and a second phone number and the symbol grows past what belongs on a business card at all.

What you encode	Bytes	Result
Name, mobile, email	about 130	Dense but printable at 3 cm
Add company and job title	about 200	Version 10 or so, print at 3.5 cm
Add a postal address and note	350 and up	Too dense for a card
A short link to a page with the vCard	21	Version 2, comfortable at 2 cm

That last row is the design decision. A link-based QR needs a network, and in return it stays scannable at a small size and keeps working when your number changes. On gc.mw a claimed name gives you both surfaces: gc.mw/@name for the page and gc.mw/@name.vcf for the contact file the page hands over, generated server-side from the card's own fields so anything you have marked private never leaves.

A checklist before you print

Write both N and FN. Escape commas and semicolons in titles and company names. Type your phone numbers so they import with labels. Include REV. Then import the file into an iPhone, an Android phone and Outlook before it goes anywhere near a press — the three of them disagree about enough that testing on one proves nothing about the others.