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?
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There is a company that sells domains, you can buy a single number for a few cents, or the last four digits with the rest fixed,
you can have it point to a company or country and decide the last numbers in house,
Although there are super markets that made their own system and have to cover everything in stickers for it to be compatible
Barcode is the same as a basic number.
Let’s say there are a billion products in the world, you have to give each a unique number. You’d need a billion numbers (product codes). If you have a trillion codes in your system you know each product can get their own unique number and not overlap. The systems that use barcodes have way more than a trillion numbers.
The reason why product codes look like bars and are called bar codes is only for a scanner to be able to read a number code quickly. Bar when it was created technology couldn’t read text or numbers so a language of bars was created for this to work. Bar codes are just product codes translated into the language of scanners.
You should check out the video KarTrack on Youtube, very interesting story about the development of barcodes.
My wife always hates when I joke with the checkout cashier’s that I have memorized all the barcodes in the store. When they pick up a can and I go black… white…. black…white….black…..😄
Bar codes are just text that is written in a font that is easy for a computer to read.
Each bar (or combination of bars) represents a letter or number.
I collect a variety of things and apps for keeping track of collectibles often use UPC to identify items uniquely. I find duplicate entries for what should be unique UPC codes all the time.
Granted, a lot of this is probably just people miss-entering data. But another thing I have noticed is that bootleg manufacturers will often steal barcodes off completely different products, or even reuse the same one. Also, since many collectibles are old, there’s the possibility some of the barcodes have been reassigned.
Most barcodes don’t have a “special sauce” that makes them work. It’s literally just a type of front. Sometimes there is a control character that adds an “return” to commit the font. When you scan a barcode at the checkout, it turns that barcode into a numeric UPC in the point-of-sale system, and presses enter to commit the input. That’s it.
If you have a barcode scanner and open a text editor and scan a barcode, it will put that barcode into the text editor as plain text. You can convert literally any string of text into a barcode, the only limit is the size of the barcode which is where QR codes come in, they fit more data into a smaller space.
It is just a system that uses lines instead of human readable characters to represent data. The lines are easy to scan using a light pen or scanner, which is what people have used for decades and long before digital cameras existed.
There are multiple standards for it, product identification is only one application. You can easily create your own barcodes and use it for whatever purpose. Common purposes are: books, warehouses, membership cards, forms and so on.
A more efficient and modern approach is to use QR codes instead, which can store more data and have error correction. However they can only be scanned by 2D scanners and cameras, not the legacy barcode scanners.
You’re /u/taimo-kun. Here. And anywhere els you can log into via Reddit. Elsewhere, that’s meaningless. Same thing.
But theres definitely overlap of barcodes. Its the interpretation that’s different.
Alright kiddo! Let’s break this down step by step:
1. Imagine a barcode as a special “secret code” made of lines.
2. Each line has a different width and space between them.
3. When you go to a store, they use a special light (scanner) to read this code.
4. The scanner talks to a computer and says, “Hey, what’s this code for?”
5. The computer replies, “That’s a box of cereal!” and tells the cashier the price.
6. And that’s how barcodes help us quickly know what an item is and how much it costs! 🛒🌟
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