SAP REGEX REPLACE documentation, setup help and example usage

ARTICLE

Replace Patterns
After searching , the replacement of substrings in character strings is the most important application of regular expressions. When replacing, the occurrences of a search (or the substrings that match a regular expression), are replaced by one or more different character strings. In ABAP, the replacement is realized using regular expressions with the addition REGEX
of the statement REPLACE .
In contrast to normal text replacements, when regular expressions are used, operators can be used in the replacement text that refer to the relevant occurrence.

Operators for Replacement Texts
The following operators can be specified in the replacement text. These operators are made up of the special characters $ ,
` , and � . The special characters can be made into literal characters using the prefix \ .

Addressing the Full Occurrence
The operators $0 and $ can be entered in the replacement text as placeholders for the full current occurrence.

Example
After replacement, text has the content "Yeah Yeah Yeah!" .
DATA text TYPE string.

text = `Yeah!`.

REPLACE REGEX `\w+` IN text WITH `$0 $0 $<(> <)>`.

Addressing the Registers of Subgroups
The operators $1 , $2 , $3 , ... can be used in the replacement text as placeholders for the character strings stored in the registers of subgroups for the current occurrence. If the n-th subgroup is not available, or it is not supplied with a value in the match, the corresponding operator $ n is replaced by the empty character string.

Example
After replacement, text has the content "Roll'n'Rock" .
DATA text TYPE string.

text = `Rock'n'Roll`.

REPLACE REGEX `(\w+)(\W\w\W)(\w+)` IN text WITH `$3$2$1`.

Addressing the Text Before the Occurrence
The operator $` can be used in the replacement text as a placeholder before the current occurrence. If multiple occurrences are replaced using REPLACE ALL OCCURRENCES , $` contains the unchanged text from the beginning of the text to the start of the occurrence, for every occurrence.

Example
After replacement, text has the content "again and again".
DATA text TYPE string.

text = `again and`.

REPLACE REGEX 'and' IN text WITH '$0 $`'.

Addressing the Text After the Occurrence
The operator $' can be used in the replacement text as a placeholder after the current occurrence.

Example
After replacement, text has the content "and again and".
DATA: text TYPE string.

text = `again and`.

REPLACE REGEX `again ` IN text WITH `$' $0`.