SAP ABAP - Strings

Strings, which are widely used in ABAP programming, are a sequence of characters.

We use data type C variables for holding alphanumeric characters, with a minimum of 1 character and a maximum of 65,535 characters. By default, these are apgned to the left.

Creating Strings

The following declaration and initiapzation creates a string consisting of the word Hello . The size of the string is exactly the number of characters in the word Hello .

Data my_Char(5) VALUE  Hello .

Following program is an example of creating strings.

REPORT YT_SEP_15. 
DATA my_Char(5) VALUE  Hello . 
Write my_Char.

The above code produces the following output −

Hello

String Length

In order to find the length of character strings, we can use STRLEN statement. The STRLEN () function returns the number of characters contained in the string.

Example

REPORT YT_SEP_15. 
DATA: title_1(10) VALUE  Tutorials ,
      length_1 TYPE I. 
	
length_1 = STRLEN( title_1 ). 
Write: /  The Length of the Title is: , length_1.

The above code produces the following output −

The Length of the Title is: 9 

ABAP supports a wide range of statements that manipulate strings.

The following example makes use of some of the above mentioned statements −

Example

REPORT YT_SEP_15. 
DATA: title_1(10) VALUE  Tutorials , 
      title_2(10) VALUE  Point ,
      spaced_title(30) VALUE  Tutorials  Point  Limited ,
      sep,
      dest1(30),
      dest2(30).
	
CONCATENATE title_1 title_2 INTO dest1. 
Write: /  Concatenation: , dest1. 

CONCATENATE title_1 title_2 INTO dest2 SEPARATED BY sep. 
Write: /  Concatenation with Space: , dest2. 

CONDENSE spaced_title.
Write: /  Condense with Gaps: , spaced_title. 

CONDENSE spaced_title NO-GAPS. 
Write: /  Condense with No Gaps: , spaced_title.

The above code produces the following output −

Concatenation: TutorialsPoint 
Concatenation with Space: Tutorials Point 
Condense with Gaps: Tutorials Point Limited 
Condense with No Gaps: TutorialsPointLimited

Note −

In case of Concatenation, the ‘sep’ inserts a space in between the fields.

The CONDENSE statement removes blank spaces between the fields, but leaving only 1 character’s space.

‘NO-GAPS’ is an optional addition to the CONDENSE statement that removes all spaces.