Asterisks in barcode human readable text

Dear All

We are using reportlab2.6 with python 2.7 to generate barcodes of standard39 and extended39 formats.

We have a requirement, that asterisks (*) must be displayed in the human readable text of barcode.

Looking at the implementation of Extended39 and Standard39 we can see that * is excluded from human readable text (Method _humanText in reportlab/graphics/barcode/code39.py:138)

As a workaround we have created custom Extended39 and Standard309 formats and overridden _humanText method to include *
), and we have monkey patched function getCodes (in reportlab/graphics/barcode/__init__.py)

Can you please let me know if we have a better alternative to overriding _humanText method to return asterisks (*) for human readable text.

Thanks for your help.

Thanks

Kumar Varadarajulu