4 Comments for what kind of information is stored in barcodes?

• 1. santekar2  |  November 7th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

  only zeros and ones are stores which is a binary numbers.

• 2. michael looooou  |  November 7th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

  The price how much this thang cost…how many of this thang the store have in stock…and the history of that same item…PeAcE

• 3. ANIRUDH K  |  November 7th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

  the information which u wanna store

• 4. Dan  |  November 7th, 2007 at 5:43 pm

  What kind of information is stored depends entirely on what sort of barcode you are asking about. For example, one of the most common barcodes is the UPC barcode found on consumer items. That barcode comes in several variations, but all of them store only numbers. You can easily read the numbers in this case, because UPC barcodes almost always have the actual numbers in them printed below the barcode itself. The numbers in a UPC barcode follow a pattern where the left-most numbers identify the company who has registered the barcode, while the right-most numbers (except for the last) identify the product that the barcode is on. The last number in a UPC barcode is a “checksum”, a number that can be calculated by performing a bit of math on all the other numbers in the barcode. The checksum helps electronic scanners determine if they have read the barcode correctly. So, you can see with even a simple barcode like a UPC that it contains information about a specific company, information about a specific product, and information about how to check the data in the barcode itself.

  Other types of barcodes can encode more than numbers. Letters, symbols and even images are possible. In more complicated barcode formats, the data they contain is highly formatted, which makes it easy for computer systems to decode many details of information at once. You can find more complicated “two-dimensional” barcodes in use by package shipping companies, for example. Such a barcode could contain information about package size, weight, destination and shipping cost. Exactly what information it contained could be customized, within limits, by the company using the barcode, so even if FedEx and UPS used the same two-dimensional barcode format (which they don’t), they could decide to store different information in it.

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