Like how is there no overlap of barcodes at all? There’s are millions if not, billions of items around the world that have unique barcodes. Are they differentiated per country or something?
In: 503
There are about 5 different major barcode standards in the world. Most of the West uses the upc standard. In that standard there are literally 100 billion different possible unique numbers. So running out is not really a problem
There probably are. You don’t need unique barcodes for every barcode on the planet. You need unique barcodes for products you need to process.
Imagine you have a barcode that reads as 1 for a piece of clothing you sell. The shop next door also has a barcode that reads as 1, but this is for a toaster.
Edit: corrected and completed by comment of Rubseb
According to premierelectronics.com, a 1d barcode can store up to 85 characters, if you used the whole alphabet and +-*/&%! that would give you 34^85 unique barcodes. I can’t state this enough 34^85 is an absolute fuck-ton.
If you use those 85bytes to represent an unsigned integer, that would be a uint680, so 2^680, which is even more unique barcodes.
In reality there will probably be duplicates, but that doesn’t matter, if the company selling their product includes their name in the barcode, that would be enough. After that the company has to figure out that no duplicates happen, similar to how MAC-addres for smart-devices, a certain range will belong to a certain company, the rest is up to them.
People mentioning barcode standards like UPC have part of the answer. The rest of the answer is the GS1 international standards body. Part of the GS1 standard is that part of each UPC number is the manufacturer prefix. For instance, a random iPhone I searched has a UPC-A code of 1 90199 22067 6. The company code for Apple is 0190199. So no one else but Apple will have this exact UPC number, and Apple would (presumably) only assign this exact number to a particular iPhone model.
Barcode is just a way to display camera readable data..
Every product has EAN number, that is displayed in barcode form.
There are 10^18 possible combinations.. every country has it’s own
Think of barcodes like landline numbers, with each number having an ‘area code’ and the number itself. There are databases out there that maintain the equivalent of telephone directories – the area code = manufacturer, phone number = exact product.
As others have pointed out, there are billions+ of numbers encoded by barcodes, the equivalent of billions of unique phone numbers.
Your standard UPC-A bar code, the 12-digit one you’ll find on most products in the United States and ~~Europe~~ Canada, is made up of three parts. The first half of the code is the manufacturer code, and the second half (minus the last number) is the product code. The last number is a check digit that’s used to ensure the bar code scanned correctly.
So, with the first half being the manufacturer code, that means that there are 1,000,000 possible manufacturers that can have their own codes assigned to them (provided 000000 is a valid code), and then they all get 100,000 individual manufactured products to assign codes to. That’s a *lot* of codes.
That being said, we *are* running out as the world gets bigger and economies grow, which is why there are different *types* of bar codes. Different types of products get different types of codes, and we’re slowly but surely moving on to QR and Data Matrix codes, both of which can be as big as they need to be in order to carry the required information and aren’t limited to a certain number of characters. Advancements in data storage (especially in the cloud) have made this possible.
In order to prevent confusion, there’s an international standards body that is actually responsible for assigning codes to manufacturers and products. This minimizes the chance of overlap and allows for reassigning codes that were issued in the past but have fallen out of use because the manufacturer ceased to exist 20 years ago or so.
Edit: Canada, not Europe. Europe uses EAN-13, which is the same code but with a 13th digit added for country code. The US and Canada have a country code of 0 which isn’t printed, and scanners manufactured after of 2005 for the US and Canada can read both codes just fine.
The common Ean code os on produced products in the store has a 13-digit numeric code, the last one is a check sum so 12 are used to identify the prodct. It is managed by the international standard organization GS1. You can see them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GS1_country_codes
The first 3 digits are a country code each block has 9 digits which is 1 billion unique numbers. One or more id give to a county where a local organization manages it.
Let’s say the local transition gives them in blocks of 1000 number, that means there are 1 million blocks like that per country code.
The company has got a block with 1000 codes or if you like 3 digits that they can change. They have to manage the last part themselves so they only use it on one product.
It this example the first 10 digits for the company produce will have the same number. next 3 is for the produce and the las is a checksum that is calculated from the first 13.
Exactly how a national organization give out block, and their size depend on the country. A single company can have multiple blocks given to the
Think of barcodes as really just a type of font which displays numbers.
So the question isn’t “do barcodes really not overlap”?
The question really is, does every product have a unique number?
It might seem like there are only a few million or so combinations. but think of it this way.
A given “width” of the barcode can be either black or white. Let’s say there are about 50 widths in a typical barcode. That makes 2^(50) unique combinations (~1,000,000,000,000,000)
Latest Answers