GS1 Composite Symbologies


GS1-128 with CC-C

GS1 composite symbologies consist of a one-dimensional (1-D) linear barcode or a two-dimensional (2-D) stacked barcode beneath a Composite Component A (CC-A), CC-B, or CC-C symbol and a separator pattern between them. The bottom component encodes the primary item ID number by using the GS1 system of identification numbers. The top component encodes secondary data, such as expiration date or batch number.

The bottom component can be one of the following GS1 symbologies:

The bottom component also gives the composite symbol its name, such as EAN-13 Composite.

The top component is always the CC-A, CC-B, or CC-C symbol. If the bottom component is any symbology other than GS1-128, the label printing software must use CC-A for the top component when the data stream has 56 or fewer characters and CC-B for data streams that have 57 or more characters. Users can choose to use CC-C only when the bottom component is GS1-128.

All GS1 composite symbologies have the following characteristics:

  • Both components of this symbology support the following character set:

    • All numeric digits (0-9)

    • All uppercase and lowercase letters (A-Z and a-z)

    • Special function character (FNC1)

    • Vertical bar (|) between the primary and secondary data

    • Special characters:

      • Exclamation point (!)

      • Quotation marks (")

      • Percent sign (%)

      • Ampersand (&)

      • Apostrophe (')

      • Opening parenthesis (()

      • Closing parenthesis ())

      • Asterisk (*)

      • Plus sign (+)

      • Comma (,)

      • Hyphen (-)

      • Period (.)

      • Slash mark (/)

      • Colon (:)

      • Semicolon (;)

      • Left angle bracket (<)

      • Equal sign (=)

      • Right angle bracket (>)

      • Question mark (?)

      • Underscore (_)

      • Space character

    Good quality label printing software automatically inserts the vertical bar between the primary and secondary data. It appears as a separator pattern in the barcode and does not appear at all in the human readable interpretation.

    The following example shows a data stream for a composite symbol that uses GS1 DataBar Limited with CC-B. A vertical bar appears just before the "21" at the beginning of the secondary data. The "7" at the end of the primary data is a check digit and the "01" at the beginning is an implied application identifier:

    01512345678907|21abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv

  • The bottom component has the full data capacity of the underlying linear or 2-D stacked symbology. The capacity of the top component is 56 characters for CC-A, 338 for CC-B, and 2,361 for CC-C.

  • The barcodes are bi-directionally readable.

  • The bottom component has one check digit, and the top component uses Reed-Solomon codewords for error correction.

  • Both components (except EAN/UPC) contain a linkage flag, which indicates that they are part of a composite symbol.

GS1 composite symbologies are defined in ISO/IEC 24723 Information technology - Automatic identification and data capture techniques - GS1 Composite bar code symbology specification and the GS1 General Specifications standard.