I work with barcodes professionally so usually dive fairly deep into the specs.
But I have one thing that I have not been able to do so far. A datamatrix GS1 structured code may be separated by FNC1 or GS. The most common in professional label software is FNC1.
Two versions of the same code is below, encoding GS1 structure (01)03041094787443(21)5Qbag!(93)Zjqw
My question is to prove which separator is used, preferably using code (python or other, that's not very important).
I have tried using the free version of BCTester, but as specification goes, I get "GS" (0x1d) returned for both versions. Every mobile scanner same result, or no technical information at all. Data scans the same for both.
FNC formatted
GS formatted (created by zintQt)
I am working with products that contains gs1 barcodes where are many application identrifiers (AI) or prefix, like (01)....(17).....(10).... . The scanner I 've got its called honeywell ms5145 and when I scann the barcode it prints as output the numbers of (01) identifier and ends before the AI (17). After a bit of searching I found some configuration barcodes where one of them is for usb full speed. When I scan this config and after that the barcode of the product the output was defferent and it was printing all the information of the barcode from (01) to (10). The (10) application identifier is for batch lot numbers and thats I want to scan. For example lets say that the barcode in one product is (01)98923424(17)99933333(10)111111B. If I scan without the usb full speed config the output will be 98923424 which is the contex of the (10) application identifier and if I scan with the config of usb full speed the output will be 9892342499933333111111B,without of course the AI.My question is, is there any way without any software configuration to extract only the batch lot number of the gs1 barcode. Genneraly is it possible to extract what ever application identifier I want with one scan ?
Notice that valid GS1 codes must contain 01 identifier, and must not repeat same identifier.
If you have a GS1 structured code like (01)12345678901238(17)231220(10)987654 you most likely scan everything.
But, your scanner can be configured to manipulate the data using the MetroSet2 software. Look at data formatting.
I have not tried it since I do not have said scanner, but typically formatting is some variant of substring. This will work if the barcodes your work with have same length. GS1 structures may switch order though, this will cause your substring to be incorrect.
An alternative could be scanners that are programmable in Javascript such as those from Code Corporation I am not affiliated with CodeCorp in any way, but work with barcodes)
Scanner Model :- Motorola- DS4208-HC
We need to parse the GS1-128 barcode. We know they are going to use GTIN(01), lot number(10), Expiration date(17), serial number (21).
Input String:- (01)07612345678900(17)100503(10)AC3453G3(21)455777
The problem is that barcode reader outputs a string, the format is like this:
01076123456789001710050310AC3453G321455777
Since there is not a separator and both serial number and lot number are a variable length according to GS1 standard, we have trouble to identify the segments.
There should be a FNC1 character at the end of a variable-length field that is not filled to maximum; so that FNC1 will appear between the G3 and the 21. what I have read is NC1 is invisible to humans but can be detected by scanners and will be reproduced in the string reported by the scanner. Simply send the string directly to a text file and examine the text with a hex reader. The FNC1 should be obvious. But we are still not able to read FNC1 in the reader.
Motorola Solutions Enterprise Business has been acquired by Zebra Technologies, so you can find support and developer forums on Zebra website Launchpad.
DS4208-HC support is available here. However seems that most of the documentation/software are only available under the model DS4208 support page
To configure the scanner you can use the 123Scan2 utility or the Scanner User Guide where you can find the configuration barcodes to enable/disable GS1 decoding (page 9-27).
Discalimer: I work for Zebra Technologies.
I came across a comment in some code referring to said code being "I18N safe".
What does this refer to?
I + (some 18 characters) + N = InternationalizatioN
I18N safe means that steps were taken during design and development that will facilitate Localization (L10N) at a later point.
This is most often referred to a code or construct ready for I18N - i.e easily supported by common I18N techniques. For instance, the following is ready:
printf(loadResourceString("Result is %s"), result);
while the following is not:
printf("Result is " + result);
because the word order may vary in different languages. Unicode support, international date-time formatting and the like also qualify.
EDIT: added loadResourceString to make an example close to real life.
i18n means internationalization => i (18 letters) n. Code that's marked as i18n safe would be code that correctly handles non-ASCII character data (e.g. Unicode).
Internationalization. The derivation of it is "the letter I, eighteen letters, the letter N".
I18N stands for Internationalization.
its a numeronym for Internationalization.
Different from Acronym, numeronym is a number based word (eg 411 = information, k9 = canine);
In code, this will normally be a folder title, that It generally refers to code that will work in international environments - with different locale, keyboard, character sets etc. ... "
Read more about it here: http://www.i18nguy.com/origini18n.html
i18n is a shorthand for "internationalization". This was coined at DEC and actually uses lowercase i and n.
As a sidenote: L10n stands for "localization" and uses capital L to distinguish it from the lowercase i.
Without any additional information, I would guess that it means the code handles text as UTF8 and is locale-aware. See this Wikipedia article for more information.
Can you be a bit more specific?
i18n-safe is a vague concept. It generally refers to code that will work in international environments - with different locale, keyboard, character sets etc. True i18n-safe code is hard to write.
It means that code cannot rely on:
sizeof (char) == 1
because that character could be a UTF-32 4-byte character, or a UTF-16 2-byte character, and occupy multiple bytes.
It means that code cannot rely on the length of a string equalling the number of bytes in a string. It means that code cannot rely on zero bytes in a string indicating a nul terminator. It means that code cannot simply assume ASCII encoding of text files, strings, and inputs.
I18N stands for Internationalization.
In a nutshell: I18N safe code means that it uses some kind of a lookup table for texts on the UI. For this you have to support non-ASCII encodings. This might seem to be easy, but there are some gotchas.
"I18N safe" coding means the code that doesn't introduce I18N bugs. I18N is a numeronym for Internationalization, where there are 18 characters between I and N.
There are multiple categories of issues related to i18n such as:
Culture Format: Date Time formats(DD/MM/YY in UK and MM/DD/YY in US ), number formats, Timezone, Measuring units change from culture to culture. The data must be accepted, processed and displayed in the right format for the right culture/locale.
International Characters Support: All the characters from all the different languages should be accepted, processed and displayed correctly.
Localizability: The translatable strings should not be hard code. They should be externalized in resource files.
"I18N Safe" coding means that none of the above issue is introduced by the way the code is written.
i18n deals with
- moving hard coded strings out of the code (not all should be by the way) so they can be localized/translated (localization == L10n), as others have pointed out, and also deals with
- locale sensitive method, such as
--methods dealing with text handling (how many words in a Japanese text is far obvious:), order/collation in different languages/writing systems,
--dealing with date/time (the simplest example is showing am/pm for the US, 24 h clocks for France for instance, going to more complex calendars for specific countries),
--dealing with arabic or hebrew (orientation of UI, of text, etc.),
--encoding as others have pointed out
--database issues
it's a fairly comprehensive angle. Just dealing with "String externalization" is far from enough.
Some (software) languages are better than others in helping developers write i18n code (meaning code which will run on different locales), but it remains a software engineering responsibility.
I am working on an application that allows users to input Japanese language characters. I am trying to come up with a way to determine whether the user's input is a Japanese kana (hiragana, katakana, or kanji).
There are certain fields in the application where entering Latin text would be inappropriate and I need a way to limit certain fields to kanji-only, or katakana-only, etc.
The project uses UTF-8 encoding. I don't expect to accept JIS or Shift-JIS input.
Ideas?
It sounds like you basically need to just check whether each Unicode character is within a particular range. The Unicode code charts should be a good starting point.
If you're using .NET, my MiscUtil library has some Unicode range support - it's primitive, but it should do the job. I don't have the source to hand right now, but will update this post with an example later if it would be helpful.
Not sure of a perfect answer, but there is a Unicode range for katakana and hiragana listed on Wikipedia. (Which I would expect are also available from unicode.org as well.)
Hiragana: Unicode: 3040-309F
Katakana: Unicode: 30A0–30FF
Checking those ranges against the input should work as a validation for hiragana or katakana for Unicode in a language-agnostic manner.
For kanji, I would expect it to be a little more complicated, as I
expect that the Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese are both included in the same range, but then again, I may be wrong here. (I can't expect that Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese to be included in the same range...)
oh oh! I had this one once... I had a regex with the hiragana, then katakana and then the kanji. I forget the exact codes, I'll go have a look.
regex is great because you double the problems. And I did it in PHP, my choice for extra strong auto problem generation
--edit--
$pattern = '/[^\wぁ-ゔァ-ヺー\x{4E00}-\x{9FAF}_\-]+/u';
I found this here, but it's not great... I'll keep looking
--edit--
I looked through my portable hard drive.... I thought I had kept that particular snippet from the last company... sorry.