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ABAP Keyword Documentation →  ABAP - Reference →  Processing Internal Data →  Character String and Byte String Processing →  Statements for Character String and Byte String Processing 

OVERLAY

Short Reference

Other versions: 7.31 | 7.40 | 7.54

Syntax


OVERLAY text1 WITH text2 [ONLY mask]. 

Effect

Characters in the text1 variable are replaced by characters in the text2 operand that are there in the same location. text2 is a character-type expression position.

If the ONLY addition is not specified, all blank characters in text1 are replaced. If the ONLY addition is specified, all characters are replaced that occur in the mask operand, and case sensitivity is taken into account. mask is also a character-type expression position.

If the lengths of text1 and text2 are different, text1 is processed using the shorter length only.

The text1, text2, and mask operands must be character-type. In operands of fixed length, closing blank characters are taken into account. If mask is an empty string, no replacements are made.

System Fields

sy-subrc Meaning
0 At least one character in text1 was replaced.
4 No characters were replaced in text1.


Example

After the text field has been assigned to the time field, it contains the invalid time "12__00" according to the conversion rule. As a result of the overlay with the initial_time constants, the two blank characters are replaced by "00" and the result is the valid time "120000".

CONSTANTS initial_time TYPE t VALUE IS INITIAL. 
DATA: time TYPE t, 
      text TYPE c LENGTH 4. 

text = '12'. 
time = text. 
OVERLAY time WITH initial_time.