# Symbol in ABAP Print out

[former_member605939]

We are facing an issue regarding '#' symbol in print out. We are with ECC EHP5.

We copy the description from MS Word and paste in MM01 during creation of material.

There is no '#' symbol in product description. (May be spaces are there). But when we take print from 'Z' program or From Standard T-Code like MM60 , the description of the product printing '#' symbol in printout not all cases but in certain case.

[former_member1716]

abaplearner,

This occurs when the description is copied from a file which is maintained in certain format and pasted directly in SAP screen.

Recommend you to delete the description completely and type the description from the beginning. Do this for one material and see if it works.

In case you have large number of materials in the system to be updated similarly i would recommend you to go for an update through LSMW (One Time Solution) or BAPI (Permanent solution).

Regards!

[keremkoseoglu]

This symbol is typically placed for a character that SAP doesn't recognize.

A typical case is a TAB character unintentionally pasted from office applications.

You can find & replace those characters with space in Word before pasting to SAP.

[satvik_panchal]

Hello,You can check the below link for some help :

Unwanted character '#'

[michael_piesche]

Copy and Paste, especially from documents and applications (word, excel, html, etc.) always needs to be handled with care. You will always copy 'formatting' values as well. Pasting them into another application can therefore lead to issues, if that application doesnt know how to handle these formattings. This is the case with the # character in SAP, where SAP simply doesnt understand what to do with this character or how to handle the display of the text. This can happen for characters of languages that are not supported by your system, but also with characters that are visible, but help to format the text (e.g. tab, carriage return, 'space', etc.)

You can either turn on the display of formatting within your application (if possible like to some degree in Word), or also copy and paste it first to a simple text editor, that is able to show you formatting characters and copy and paste only what you want, from the simple text editor to your SAP application.

This solution is not satisfying, but the only better solution is to automate your process and cut out the manual, erronous work.

[former_member605939]

Mr. michael.piesche Mr. kerem.koseoglu

As per suggestions I copied the original file from excel (Collected from User before moving to SAP) and pasted in notepad file. Some of the descriptions have the tab separated between two words, that can print '#'. But also checked some of the texts that donot have any tab but only single space. That also print '#'. So my dought is how can i assure what is the exact reason of this. How to take preventive measures.

Thanks

[michael_piesche]

Coming from Excel, it can be either tabs as you mentioned, but also be carriage returns and line feed symbols (new line) within a cell. Try copying those descriptions with that error that you have not figured out yet into different applications, such as Word, Excel or even the answer box for this thread and see what happens.

Did you actually paste your text into the application "Notepad", you didnt see anything wrong with it, copied it again from there and pasted it into SAP and it did 'carry' your invisible character along to SAP? Have you tried the same with the URL field of your browser (you need a plain text field to get rid off any unwanted characters)?

[former_member605939]

That is ok. What you suggested, need to take care of coping the data and pasting while making file.

As i gone through One SAP Note note 2205846 ( Character "#" in phrases, user-defined texts, and reports).

Does this note need to implement in SAP as we are on SAP ECC6 EHP5.

Thanks

[michael_piesche]

The note 2205846 'implements' no solution, it only gives you advice how to deal with your # problem, just like we did in this questions of yours.

However, it gives you one further report "RC1_CORRECT_ESTDF_LONGTEXT" to be used for user defined free texts (definitions defined in table ESTDF) to get rid off the "Line Feed" control character LF (Hex'0A'). For your case, you would have to, like the note also mentions, use that report as a template for your texts (I assume MAKT~MAKTX Material/Article Description) and also for your erroneous symbol. And you also would have to find a function module that will update your text after you corrected the values.

In the report, they search for the following to replace it. But you could also use CL_ABAP_CHAR_UTILITIES to search for further HORIZONTAL_TAB, VERTICAL_TAB, NEWLINE, CR_LF, FORM_FEED, BACKSPACE.

l_search_string = |\n|.

And finally, you could also identify the binary value of your character that keeps messing with you and try to look for that in your texts to be replaces.

If you dont find the report RC1_CORRECT_ESTDF_LONGTEXT in your system, you can implement note 2127749 and do the manual work for the text symbols and selection texts.

But since you found that note, you should have known that already. In the future, please read SAP Notes carefully and understand them well enough, to make a reasonable decision yourself.

[Sandra_Rossi]

Note 2205846 - Character "#" in phrases, user-defined texts, and reports is only applicable to SAP ECC component:EHS-BD-SPE Product Safety Report Definition, and is only a CONSULTING note.

Note 2127749 Analysis and adjustment program for long texts of user-defined texts contains the program RC1_CORRECT_ESTDF_LONGTEXT, which is only applicable to SAP ECC component:EHS-BD-SPE Product Safety Report Definition.

[former_member605939]

Thank you,

So we need rectification of copying and pasting text from excel/word into SAP to avoid '#' symbol in description.

We have almost 4000 plus material codes and descriptions. '#' sign visible only when we take print out.

How to find out all the descriptions with '#' symbols. So that we can rectify manual.

[michael_piesche]

abaplearner, as I understood you, you still have cases where the # is generated, but you dont know why or what the actual character is.

Try out this tool to find any "hidden/unprintable" unicode-characters:
https://www.soscisurvey.de/tools/view-chars.php
kudos for this tip go to thalesvb !!!

And once you know the uni-code, you will most likely be able to find out how and where it comes from and be able to make the users aware of this when filling out the excel.

=> But you, or rather the business, should also seriously consider moving away from this manual copy and paste routine and move to a more sophisticated way of getting that data into the system 😉

[Sandra_Rossi]

From the comments you have posted, there are two problems that have to be analyzed and solved separately. Eventually it's a good idea to ask two distinct questions so that answers and comments are not mixed:

• A text pasted into the SAP editor, after being saved, shows # characters. Ask the users to adopt this procedure: save + check what the system has saved + replace manually the # characters.
• Some special characters are correctly stored in SAP database, eventually looking like spaces, but are printed like #. In that case, it comes from SAP and is due to the Character Set assigned to the Device type of the Output Device used (this character set does not have a conversion rule for the given character).

There are a few SAP notes which contain recommendations. I let you search.

If you need further, please provide all information (what Unicode character has a problem, exact transaction code, SAP editor used for long text entry, device type definition and so on)

[former_member605939]

Mr. sandra.rossi

Thanks for Explanations. As required the further details are attached.During debugging came to know the hexadecimal code is "00A0"

and device type is HP

both are attatched:device-type-details.png

hexadecimal-details.png

[Sandra_Rossi]

Mrs. Learner,

Thank you for showing the output device which is of type ZSWIN. Could you please indicate what character set it uses? Anyway, if it's a copy of standard SWIN, unchanged, the standard character set is 1134 which doesn't map U+00A0 as you can see in transaction code SCP. Hence the display like #. That's weird, but I don't see a single code page which maps U+00A0 unfortunately. So, that's the explanation of the symptom. Editing the code pages is not really obvious, so maybe the easiest solution is to run a background program to replace U+00A0 (non-break space) with U+0020 (space).

Signed: Mr. Expert 😉

[michael_piesche]

abaplearner, please follow up on your open question.

• comment answers or your question if there are still open issues.
• otherwise mark an answer as accepted if it helped you solve your problem
• or post an answer of yourself and accept it if you found another useful solution yourself
• or redirect your question to another question that is related and was useful to solve your problem
• in the end, close your question