As of release 7.0, ABAP supports extended regular expressions in accordance with POSIX standard 1003.2. Regular expressions can be used after the addition REGEX of the statements FIND and REPLACE for searching in character strings. The classes CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER permit object-oriented use of regular expressions.
A regular expression r represents a set of character strings. If text is a character string represented by r, we say that r matches text or that r fits text. Two (different) regular expressions match if they fit the same set of character strings.
If you apply a regular expression to a character string text as a search string, then you are searching for matches of the regular expression with substrings of text. In this case, specific special characters of the regular expression do not match characters, but instead match positions, thus influencing the type and number of found locations.
This software uses the Boost Regex Library. Copyright (c) 1998-2004 Dr. John Maddock.