Literals

A literal is a fixed value. ABAP distinguishes between text literals and number literals.

Text literals

Text literals are sequences of alphanumeric characters enclosed in single quotation marks.

'Antony Smith'
'69190 Walldorf'

Text literals can be up to 254 characters long. If a text literal contains a quotation mark, you must repeat it to enable the system to recognize the contents as a text literal and not as the end of the literal.

WRITE: / 'This is John''s bicycle'.

This statement generates the following output:

This is John's bicycle

To ensure that programs remain easy to maintain and language-independent, do not use text literals explicitly in the final version of a program. Instead, define them externally as text symbols. Text symbols are part of the text element concept in ABAP. For further information on this and an explanation of how to create and use text symbols, see Working with Text Elements.

Number literals

Number literals are sequences of digits which may contain a leading sign. They can contain up to 15 digits.

123
-93
+456

If you need a non-integer value or a longer number, you must use a text literal which is converted to the correct type automatically (for more information about this, see Type Conversions).

'12345678901234567890'
'+0.58498'
'-8473.67'

Likewise, use a text literal to represent a floating point value. This must have the following format:

'[<mantissa>][E][<exponent>]'

'-12.34567'

'-765E-04'

'1234E5'

'+12E+23'

'+12.3E-4'

'1E160'