Scanning Barcode In Web Apps

Exciting news for web developers! 🎉 The Barcode API is for browsers for generating and scanning barcodes seamlessly on your website web apps. While native implementations in browsers only support certain barcode formats, libraries like QuaggaJs or ZXing have more extensive functionality."

QuaggaJS is a JavaScript library that supports real-time barcode scanning and decoding from a live video stream, while ZXing is a popular open-source library that supports the decoding of various barcode formats. Both libraries offer a range of customization features

Simple Walkthrough

// Check if the Barcode API is supported by the browser
if ('BarcodeDetector' in window) {

  // Create a new BarcodeDetector object
  const barcodeDetector = new BarcodeDetector();

  // Get an image element from the DOM
  const img = document.querySelector('img');


  // Detect barcodes in the image
  barcodeDetector.detect(img).then(barcodes => {

    // Log the detected barcodes
    console.log(barcodes);


    // Loop through the detected barcodes and extract the data
    for (let barcode of barcodes) {
      console.log(`Barcode format: ${barcode.format}`);
      console.log(`Barcode data: ${barcode.rawValue}`);
    }

  }).catch(err => {
    console.error('Barcode detection failed:', err);
  });

} else {
  console.warn('Barcode API is not supported by this browser.');
}

In this example, we first check if the BarcodeDetector class is available in the global window object, which is the entry point to the browser's JavaScript environment. If it is, we create a new BarcodeDetector object and use its detect method to detect barcodes in an image element on the page. The detect method returns a Promise that resolves with an array of Barcode objects, which contain information about the detected barcode, such as its format and raw value.

Conclusion

Note that the BarcodeDetector API is still experimental and may not be available in all browsers. You can check the browser compatibility tables for more information.