Code128 has special control symbols that are distinct from ASCII control characters which are used for framing/formating in context of GS1. Datamatrix also has

Code128 has special control symbols that are distinct from ASCII control characters which are used for framing/formating in context of GS1. Datamatrix also has special symbol that is equivalent to FNC1. The fact that scanners often encode FNC1 as some arbitrary ASCII character, with GS and ^ being common choices or even reformat the data to something resembling the human readable representation (ie. "(01)..." instead of FNC1 0 1 ...) is only about the scanner interface. But IIRC QR code does not have any special out-of-ASCII control symbols and GS1 structures are encoded with ASCII GS instead of FNC1.