A pattern of literal and special characters that describes a set of character strings. Using regular expressions in text searches locates one or more occurrences of the character strings represented by the expression. A search using a regular expression is more powerful that a search for a simple character string, as the regular expression represents a greater (potentially infinite) number of character strings and searches for them in parallel. In ABAP, regular expressions can be used as of release 7.0 in the statements FIND and REPLACE and the classes CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER.