Abap data parser – open source TAB-delimited text parser

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 ! =)