GS1-128, EAN/UCC-128, EAN-128, UCC-128

The GS1-128 is a special form of the Code 128. It’s used for goods and palettes in commerce and industry. The name GS1-128 replaces the old name EAN/UCC 128.

There can be coded more than one data field inside one barcode. For example a food palette gets a barcode with the product number (e.g. the EAN 13 number) and additional the weight and the pull date.

To code this different data field inside one barcode the GS1-128 or EAN/UCC-128 codes used the international standard of Application Identifiers (AI). A barcode could look like this:

The numbers inside the brackets are the Application Identifiers (AI) and the data behind are the data for this AI. The brackets are only used for the human readable line of the barcode. There are not coded! The AI “(01)” defines that the product code follows. This product code is always 14 digits long. This length is specified with the AI. This 14 data digits follow directly to the AI. After the product code of 14 digits, the next AI follows. In this example it’s the pull date, specified with the AI “(15)”. This one is always 6 digits long and must be specified using the mask YYMMTT. In this example the date is 31st December 2005

Example: You want a code containing the Number in parts (AI #30) and the serial number (AI #21):

In this example the “number of parts” is 19 and the serial number is 123456789012. The “number of parts” can be up to 8 digits long. So we code a FNC1 after the 9 to let the scanner know, that the AI is closed here now and a new one follows.

More information about this can be found at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAN-128