EAN/JAN-8

The European Article Numbering (EAN) system (also known as International Article Number) and the Japanese Article Numbering (JAN) system are members of the UPC barcode family that was developed in the 1970s for automatic identification of retail products.

The EAN and JAN symbologies are identical, except that JAN uses a country code in the range of 490 to 499, which indicates that the manufacturer was registered in Japan.

EAN-8 is a smaller version of EAN/JAN-13 that was developed for use on small packages that would not accommodate EAN-13. It is encoded the same way as EAN-13 except for having only four digits in each half instead of six as with EAN-13.

EAN-8 is defined in ISO/IEC 15420 Information technology - Automatic identification and data capture techniques - EAN/UPC bar code symbology specification. The GS1 implementation is defined in GS1 General Specifications.

ClosedSymbol Structure

ClosedCharacter Set

ClosedCheck Digit

ClosedDensity

ClosedCombining EAN with Other Symbologies