Click here to Skip to main content
65,938 articles
CodeProject is changing. Read more.
Articles
(untagged)

How to Generate Check Digits and verify your barcodes

0.00/5 (No votes)
28 Sep 2006 1  
Generates Check Digits and alows you to verify proper scan of a barcode

Sample Image - BarcodeCheckDigAndVerify.png

Introduction

This only does 12 digit barcodes for now. if your interested in how this works go to
www.howstuffworks.com/upc.htm whichi is where I got most of my information. I just thought it would be nice to have a quick function to do the math for me and figured I should share ;)

a basic summary goes something like this:

To figure out what the chekdigit is suposed to be add together all of the odd digits and multiply by 3, then add all the even digits and add to the last result. Then find the number that when added to that makes it evenly divisible by to (10-(total mod 10))

To make sure a barcode is valid just do the same math but at the end say (total mod 10)==0

Its fairly basic but seems a little backwards on a string since they are zero based arrays. You just swap evens for odds

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here