SAP BUILTIN TYPES CHARACTER documentation, setup help and example usage

ARTICLE

Predefined Character-Like Types
The data objects of the character-like data types are used to handle character strings.

Properties
Type Length Standard Length Name
ABAP_KEY c 1 to 262,143 characters1 characters Text Field
ABAP_KEY string Variable Text string
ABAP_KEY n 1 to 262,143 characters1 characters Numeric text field
ABAP_KEY d 8 characters
Character-like date field
ABAP_KEY t 6 characters
Character-like time field

Value Ranges and Initial Values
Type Value Range Initial Value
c Any alphanumeric characters " " for every position
string As for type c Empty string with length 0
n Any alphanumeric characters; only valid values are the digits 0 to 9, however"0" for every position
d Any eight alphanumeric characters; only those digits are valid, however, that are valid as dates according to the calendar rules in the format "yyyymmdd" : "yyyy" (year): 0001 to 9999, "mm" (month): 01 to 12, "dd" (day): 01 to 31 "00000000"
t Any six alphanumeric characters; the only valid values are numbers that are valid as times in the 24-hour clock format "hhmmss"
. "hh" (hours): 00 to 23, "mm" (minutes): 00 bis 59, "ss" (seconds): 00 to 59."000000"

Notes

The character-like data types are mainly used for string processing . For information about using the character-like date type d and time type t , see Character-Like Date Fields and Time Fields

.

When specifying lengths for character-like types, note that the length of a character in bytes depends on the character representation used. A character has a length of one byte in non-Unicode systems. In Unicode systems, UTF-16 is used as the system code page and a character is two bytes long.

The types c and n , for which a length interval is specified in the second column in the first table, are generic , which means that the length is not part of the type description. The entries in the Standard Length column specify the length used in declarations of data objects when using types with generic lengths, if no explicit length is specified in the relevant statement.

For the data types n , d , and t , the valid values are a subset of their value range. ABAP statements that work with data objects of these types are only guaranteed to function correctly for operands with valid values.

Documentation extract taken from SAP system, � Copyright SAP AG. All rights reserved