SE80 - Ctrl+Backspace does not work properly

[Former Member]

dear all,

I am working with abap editor (SE80) in ECC 6.0/SapGui 730 PL11. In SE80 I change an old program and have there many comments, which are looking like this:

* --------- read table ----------

If I move the cursor to the very right and try to delete all of the minus characters right of "table" using the shortcut Ctrl+Backspace the word "table" also disappears. Also the shortcut Ctrl+left/Ctrl+right does not work as I would expect. It seems abap editor does not recognise the space between a "normal" word and a sequence of special characters properly.

What do you think, is it a bug or a feature? Is it worth to be raised to SAP as an issue?

best regards

Alexander

[Former Member]

It is probably because of configuration of ABAP lexer.

I would not call it a bug but you can raise it to SAP.

If you open C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Roaming\SAP\SAP GUI\ABAP Editor\abap_spec.xml file (path might be different, you will see that words comprise of 0-9a-Z_/<>. This is in line with the letters that you can have in variable names.

Whereas in normal text editors, 0-9a-Z are part of word.

Because of this range, you are able to select the variable names like varname, <varname> , /scwm/varname , /scwm/var_Name etc.

In ABAP Editor, word selection is by Ctrl + Click because double click is used for forward navigation.

Since hiphen - is not part of word, Ctrl + Backspace deletes the first word that is at the left of cursor.

Note: You can use regular expression if you just want to delete hiphens/spaces towards end of a line.

Expression -+ *$ will match your pattern.

[Former Member]

thank you for your reply! I changed both abap_spec.xml and abap4_spec.xml the same way:

<Words>0-9a-Z_/& lt;& gt;+-*$</Words>

After saving both files und restart my sapgui I am still facing the same issue. Unfortunately I can not raise this issue to SAP. Our first level support rejects it as "normal SAP behavoir".

[Former Member]

Then it is a programmed behavior.

Notepad does not delete word on Ctrl Backspace.

Notepad++ and Microsoft Word behave like you want them to.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, this SCN reply box behaves same as ABAP Editor.

So, not a bug.