Abap tab-delimited text parser

I'd like to share a piece of code which might be useful for someone. It is called text2tab (at the time of initial publishing - 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.

Example

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 ).

Unstrict mode

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).

Use-cases

• We (our company) use the code for some of our company's products - like FI Mass posting tool for SAP
• We use it in the mockup loader - another our openly published tool for unit testing (actually the text2tab was a part of mockup loader initially)
• As a tool for mass uploads for custom tables of some other our products (selective backups)

The code is free to use under MIT licence and ca be found in this github repository.

Installation can be done with abapGit tool.

I hope you find this useful!

P.S. Originally posted at SAP Community platform on 2016-Aug-28.