EAN

The European Article Numbering (EAN) system is used for products that require a country origin. This is a fixed-length bar code used to encode either eight or thirteen characters. The first two characters identify the country of origin, the next characters are data characters, and the last character is the checksum. The EAN character set is a superset of the UPC-A character set. Note that supplementals are not supported.

An EAN bar code consists of the following:

  • Left guard pattern

  • Odd parity digits

  • Center guard pattern

  • Even parity digits

  • Mandatory check digit

  • Right guard pattern

An example of an EAN-8 bar code is shown below:

Sample EAN bar code