You can assign the contents of a data object of one data type to the data object of another data type. In this case, the data types involved must be convertible.

With compatible data types, you do not even need to convert the value of the source field to the data type of the target field because all the technical properties are the same.

You can use the MOVE statement ot the assignment operator (=) to assign a value of a data object of one data type to the data object of another data type if, and only if, the two data types are convertible. The value of the source object is converted to the data type of the target object. The conversion follows the rules that are defined in the system and described in the following topics.

With all ABAP operations that perform value assignments between data objects (e.g. arithmetic operations or filling internal tables), the system handles all the necessary type conversions as for the MOVE statement. If the data types of two fields are not convertible and you try to assign the contents from one field to the other, the system reports an error during the syntax check or even reacts with a runtime error.

The following topics describe the conversion rules defined in ABAP between non-compatible data types.

With some ABAP statements which pass data between different objects, the alignment of data objects also plays a role. For information about the alignment of data objects, see