| regular expression (BC-ABA) |
A regular expression is a pattern of literal- and special characters that characterize a string. When regular expressions are used in a text search, then you are interested in one or more occurrences of the string represented by the expression. The search using a regular expression is more powerful than searching for a simple string because the regular expression stands for a (potentially endless) number of strings that are searched for in parallel. As of Release 7.0, regular expressions can be used in ABAP in the FIND and REPLACE statements, as arguments of certain predefined functions, as well as in the CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER classes.