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I'm trying to search the documentation for a data element whose description contains the string '*hh:mm' but not 'mm:ss' (where '' is a wildcard for any number of characters).

I don't know how to do it, so I was wondering if any of you know the regex system SAP GUI uses, so I can have a look at what I can do with it.

Thx, you guys rule!

Sandra Rossi
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vlad-ardelean
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  • I don't know about SAP R/3, but I'm not 100% this is possible with regex alone, since both patterns are syntactically the same- the meaning of the information changes, which regular expressions can't predict. – David B Jun 20 '12 at 13:29
  • with regular expresions i can specify a pattern to search for "hh:mm", that DOESN'T also have a ":ss" attached to it. I didn't mean for the patterns to be the same, consider everything except '*' to be literal. – vlad-ardelean Jun 21 '12 at 11:57

2 Answers2

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The GUI does not give you the opportunity to use regular expressions. You're limited to a simple pattern matching using * and ?. Furthermore, it's a bad idea to search using the description text because the text and the search is case sensitive - you'd find "hh:mm", but not "HH:MM". In the special case you mention, you could use the repository infosystem to search for domains based on the data type TIMS but with an output length of 5 and then use the where-used index to find out a corresponding data element. (It might even be possible to search for a data element based on a certain data type, I'm not entirely sure.)

vwegert
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As of release 7.0, ABAP supports extended regular expressions in accordance with POSIX standard 1003.2.

The classes CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER permit object-oriented use of regular expressions.

More detail here

Esti
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