Introduction
As of release 7.0, ABAP supports regular expressions based on POSIX standard 1003.2. Regular expressions may be specified after the addition REGEX within the FIND and REPLACE statements.
An entire description of the topic constitutes a book by itself. However, the most important and commonly used regular expressions requirements will be discussed.
In the introduction, we will cover important operators used in regular expression processing within ABAP. These will be used in the various recipes mentioned in this chapter. We will then see recipes for writing programs that uses regular expressions for pattern matching, validation as well as conversion and extraction of data from a given text stream. Throughout the chapter, the terms "Regular Expression" and "Regex" will be used interchangeably.
In addition to FIND and REPLACE statements, SAP provides classes CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER for regex processing. However, the coding in the recipes will comprise regular expressions...
