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Example:

Code 2 of 5 is a popular barcode for encoding numeric data.

Key features:

• 2 different width of bar/space.
• Symbol set consists of digits 0-9
• Each character is made up of 2 wide and 3 narrow elements.
• Start sequence is narrow bar, narrow space, narrow bar, narrow space.
• End sequence is wide bar, narrow space, narrow bar.
• Characters are encoded in pairs consisting of 5 bars and 5 spaces. The bars encode the first character of a pair and the spaces encode the other.
• No spaces between the pairs of characters ensure a higher density than non-interleaved variants.
• The number of bars plus 1 must be divisible by 5.
• Optional checksum character.
• An odd number of characters should be padded with a leading zero before encoding.

Specification:

Due to the nature of the interleaved format the Visual Pattern shows the character as it would appear in the bars of a character pair. The spaces are not set for any particular character.

Symbol	Narrow/Wide Pattern	Visual Pattern
0	NNWWN
1	WNNNW
2	NWNNW
3	WWNNN
4	NNWNW
5	WNWNN
6	NWWNN
7	NNNWW
8	WNNWN
9	NWNWN

Note that the petterns for the above characters exactly match the black bars for the same characters in Code 39.

Example: The character pair 58 would be encoded by the pattern enclosed in the following box:

Checksum Calculation:

1. Identify odd/even character positions. The right hand most character is always even.
2. Sum all the characters in odd positions.
3. Sum all the characters in even positions and multiply by 3.
4. Add the values from steps 2 and 3
5. Determine the smallest value, which when added to result of step 4, gives a multiple of 10. This is the cheksum character.

Example:

To calculate the checksum for the number 33589

Sum of odd characters = 3 + 8 = 11

Sum of even characters = 3 + 5 + 9 = 17 X 3 = 51

11 + 51 = 62

62 + 8 = 70 (which is divisible by 10), so the checksum character is 8.

Note that if the original number of digits is even then a leading zero should be added either before or after the checksum calculation.