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A printed UPCE symbol stores only six characters. The AX-4 recognition engine after reading a UPCE symbol expands that string to 12 characters. Implied zeroes are inserted into Manufacturer ID-code and Item-code. This is required by standard committee; the idea is to establish compatibility with strings derived from UPCA. Therefor the data base indexing process is identical when reading either UPCA or UPCE symbols. In UPCE the end-user sees a symbol with fewer bars than a UPCA symbol, but it does the same job as a UPCA symbol. However, this trick works only if Manufacturer ID and/or Item codes contain a sufficient number of leading zeroes.
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