ABAP Development Blog

Have you ever had a variable containing text? I am sure you did and regularly do. What is your preferred way to do declare it? If you don't know or use the second option, then this post is for you. There is a minute difference in the way text literal has been defined in options one and two.  First of all the declaration is a literal being passed to a variable, and some of you may ask: what is a literal?     L iterals are defined in the source code of a program by specifying a string representing a value.     Possible literals are numeric literals and character literals. The character literal comprises text       field literals and text string literals. So there are two kinds of text literal, let's see them in detail. Text Field Literals:   - Defined using single inverted commas (').   - Data type is c  with the length of the included characters, including trailing blanks.   ...

No matter how much I try to move away, I keep coming back to this. I have talked about this multiple times in multiple posts and yet it seems less. So bear with me and hope you stay sane/awake by the time we reach the end. Alright, The issue is simple. Handling of trailing blanks . No need to read further if you know it all. For the rest of the mortals like me, let's proceed. When it comes to character string processing, ABAP gives you two built-in options:  C - Fixed length, trailing blanks are ignored , minimum length is 1. STRING - Dynamic length, trailing blanks are relevant , minimum length is 0. Before you start feeling unrewarded for all the build-up at the start, I have a program to share: Running the program gives this output. The Output is different even with the seemingly same code.  Why? Because the devil is in the details, c_text_space is type c and contains one blank (trailing) which gets i...