Reminder: ABAP Built-in Functions

[horst_keller]

The ABAP language offers so many features that you easily can lose track of them all. A recent discussion showed that. The task is some operation on a character string and the question was how to achieve that. The first answer was to do it with regular expressions, and I guess I would have answered the same. Regular expression are general and powerful and you can achieve almost anything you want in finding and replacing characters in strings. They can be easily tested with programs DEMO_REGEX and DEMO_REGEX_TOY. Because of that one can easily forget that there are other more simple and performant means for accomplishing many fundamental tasks. Another answer pointed that out: There is a wealth of built-in functions available in ABAP, especially for string processing, that can be used for many requirements. Those functions can be nested and can use expression (especially string and regular expressions) as operands. If you do not want to break a butterfly on a wheel, built-in functions can help you in many cases to achieve your results.

As a reminder I copied the overview of the built-in functions from the documentation below. Check also the examples in the respective sections of the documentation.

Built-in Functions - Overview

The following tables show the predefined functions by purpose. Predefined functions are generally processing functions or description functions.

• A processing function performs general processing and returns a return code according to its purpose.
• A description function determines a property of an argument and usually returns this property as a numeric value.

Furthermore, there are logical functions that either are boolean functions that evaluate a logical expression or predicate functions that return a truth value.

Logical Functions

Function	Meaning
boolc, boolx, xsdbool	Boolean functions
contains, contains_any_of, contains_any_not_of	Predicate functions for strings
matches	Predicate function for strings
line_exists	Predicate function for internal tables

→ More

Numeric Functions

Function	Meaning
abs, ceil, floor, frac, sign, trunc	General numeric functions
ipow	Integer power function
nmax, nmin	Numeric extremum functions
acos, asin, atan, cos, sin, tan, cosh, sinh, tanh, exp, log, log10, sqrt	Floating point functions
round, rescale	Rounding functions

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String Functions

Function	Meaning
charlen, dbmaxlen, numofchar, strlen	Length functions
char_off	Length function
cmax, cmin	Character-like extremum value functions
count, count_any_of, count_any_not_of	Search functions
distance	Similarity function
condense	Condense function
concat_lines_of	Concatenation function
escape	Escape function
find, find_end, find_any_of, find_any_not_of	Search functions
insert	Insert function
match	Substring function
repeat	Repeat function
replace	Replace function
reverse	Reverse function
Segment	Segment function
shift_left, shift_right	Shift functions
substring, substring_after, substring_from, substring_before, substring_to	Substring functions
to_upper, to_lower, to_mixed, from_mixed	Case functions
translate	Translation function

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Byte String Functions

Function	Meaning
xstrlen	Length function
bit-set	Bit function

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Table Functions

Function	Meaning
lines	Row function
line_index	Index function

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