Tutorial by Examples

The REPLACE statement can work with regular expressions directly: DATA(lv_test) = 'The quick brown fox'. REPLACE ALL OCCURRENCES OF REGEX '\wo' IN lv_test WITH 'XX'. The variable lv_test will evaluate to The quick bXXwn XXx.

The FIND statement can work with regular expressions directly: DATA(lv_test) = 'The quick brown fox'. FIND REGEX '..ck' IN lv_test. " sy-subrc == 0 FIND REGEX 'a[sdf]g' IN lv_test. " sy-subrc == 4

For more advanced regex operations it's best to use CL_ABAP_REGEX and its related classes. DATA: lv_test TYPE string, lo_regex TYPE REF TO cl_abap_regex. lv_test = 'The quick brown fox'. CREATE OBJECT lo_regex EXPORTING pattern = 'q(...)\w'. DATA(lo_matcher) = lo_regex->cr...

The predicate function matches can be used to evaluate strings on the fly without use of any object declarations. IF matches( val = 'Not a hex string' regex = '[0-9a-f]*' ). cl_demo_output=>display( 'This will not display' ). ELSEIF matches( val = '6c6f7665' reg...

By using the method GET_SUBMATCH of class CL_ABAP_MATCHER, we can get the data in the groups/subgroups. Goal: get the token to the right of the keyword 'Type'. DATA: lv_pattern TYPE string VALUE 'type\s+(\w+)', lv_test TYPE string VALUE 'data lwa type mara'. CREATE OBJECT ref_regex EX...