Hi Community !I'd like to share a piece of code which might be useful for someone. It is called
abap data parser. Its purpose is parsing of TAB-delimited text into an arbitrary flat structure or internal table. Why TAB-delimited? This is the format which is used automatically if you copy (clipboard) something from Excel - this creates some opportunities for good program usability.
So what does it do. Let's say we have this data in a form of string (CRLF as a line delimiter, TAB as a field delimiter):
NAME BIRTHDATE
ALEX 01.01.1990
JOHN 02.02.1995
LARA 03.03.2000
... and a corresponding data type and internal table.
types: begin of my_table_type,
name type char10,
birthdate type datum,
end of my_table_type.
data lt_container type my_table_type.
To parse the string into the container table just add the following code:
lcl_data_parser=>create( lt_container )->parse(
exporting i_data = lv_some_string_with_data
importing e_container = lt_container ).
The class supports some additional features, in particular, "
unstrict mode" which allow to skip field of the target structure in text - useful when you need to load just several certain fields of a huge data structure (like standard tables in SAP). Let's consider our data type has additional field, unnecessary in the current context:
types: begin of my_table_type,
name type char10,
city type char40, " << New field, but still just 2 in the text
birthdate type datum,
end of my_table_type.
...
lcl_data_parser=>create(
i_pattern = lt_container
i_amount_format = ' .' " specify thousand and decimal delimiters
)->parse(
exporting
i_data = lv_some_string_with_data
i_strict = abap_false " missing city field will not throw an error
i_has_head = abap_true " headers in the first line of the text
importing
e_container = lt_container ).
Another feature:
i_has_head parameter above means that the first line contains tech names of the fields - then the parser uses it to identify existing fields
and their order (which may be flexible then).
Cases of usage
- we (our company) use the code for some of our company's products - like this one
- we use it in the mockup loader - another our openly published tool for unit testing (actually the data parser was a part of mockup loader initially)
- as a tool for mass uploads for some z-tables of some other our products
The code is free to use under MIT licence. Project home page is
https://github.com/sbcgua/abap_data_parser
Installation can be done manually - just 1 include to to install - or with
abapGit tool (the most convenient way).
I hope you find this useful !
😃
