The Universal Product Code or UPC is a particular kind of barcode which is used in countries including Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, etc. to track the products.
The commonly used barcode is UPC-A and it has 12 numerical digits which are assigned to each product. Each UPC-A code includes a strip containing black bars as well as white spaces which could be scanned. It follows a 12-numerical digit pattern. There would be no characters or letters or other content on a UPC-A barcode. Further, there would be a one-to-one correspondence between the bars and digits. In fact, the 12- digit number could be represented by only one method. Also, there is only a single method in order to represent every visual barcode in numerical terms.
The area which could be scanned in a UPC-A barcode has the following pattern of SLLLLLLMRRRRRRE where ‘S’ denotes start ‘M’ denotes middle and ‘E’ denotes end. These guard bars are given in the same way on each UPC barcode where the left and right sections represent 12 numerical digits collectively. This way of representing the 12 digits make each product code unique. The first L denotes a specific number system which should be used by the digits which follow. The last R represents the error detecting check digit which permits the detection of errors during manual entry or scanning. The non-numerical guard bars are used to separate the two six-digit groups. There are also a host of online programmes available to understand figures better. These barcodes could be printed in different densities using a wide range of scanning and printing processes. The width of a single module is called the x-dimension. Only a single x-dimension should be used throughout a particular UPC-A barcode. The width and space of the bar is calculated by multiplying x-dimension with the module width or space of every bar.
To summarize, it is mandatory to have a basic knowledge about the Universal Product Code in today’s world.
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