Alphanumerics with UCC128 barcode

I have the following ZPL code

^FO25,215^A0,N,25,25^BCN,100,N,N,N,U^FN21^FS

The customer wants this barcode as a UCC 128 barcode, but their data is alphanumeric.

Research

I looked through the ZPL docs which mentions:

• option U for the mode defaults to Subset C which automatically strips out the alpha characters.
• can prepend the entry with >9 or >7 to make this Subset A which allows alphanumerics.

Issue

I tried:

^FO25,215^A0,N,25,25^BCN,100,N,N,N,U^FN>721^FS

But it still removes the letters from the barcode. Not only that, but it adds 7 as well.

There is nothing that precludes using alphanumeric with UCC-128 (aka GS1-128).

GS1-128 compliant format

What you must do for a code128 barcode to be GS1-128 compliant is to format the data correctly.

That means the barcode data must be formatted as:

<fnc1> <app-id> <value>

Where:

1. <FNC1> character in ZPL is >8 for all character sets.
2. <app-id> is the application-identifier (AI) for your barcode purpose
3. <value> is the (alpha-numeric) data to be encoded with the barcode

A good summary of UCC application-identifiers (AI) gives UCC-128, EAN-128 & GS1-128 Bar Code Explained (wayback archive from 2017).

Example

Let's say you would use an AI of 10 and are encoding the batch number 1702ABCD.

Then the resulting ZPL field data would be: ^FD>8101702ABCD^FS