.VCF

Introduction

vCard is the standard text format for contact details: names, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses and photos. Version 2.1 came from the versit Consortium in the 1990s; version 3.0 is RFC 2426 and version 4.0 is RFC 6350, from 2011. Address books on phones and computers export and import contacts as .vcf files, and one file can hold a single contact or a whole address book.

Genetics software uses .vcf for a different format, the Variant Call Format, which lists differences in DNA sequences.

Structure

A vCard uses the same content lines as iCalendar: NAME;PARAMETER=value:value, with long lines folded onto lines that start with a space. Each contact sits between BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD, and the first line inside gives the version, such as VERSION:4.0.

Common properties are FN (the full name to display), N (the name in parts: family, given, middle, prefixes, suffixes), TEL, EMAIL, ADR, ORG, BDAY and PHOTO. Parameters such as TYPE=work or TYPE=cell label each one. Version 2.1 files often use quoted-printable encoding and a CHARSET parameter; later versions are UTF-8.

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