Automate

Hi Automate Community!

I have a tip on how you can improve data quality in SAP by using regular expressions in Transaction. A regular expression is a pattern used to match character combinations in strings. Here's an example of how a regular expression can be used in Transaction:

Scenario – You only want to allow certain special characters in the name of your business partners (customers and vendors) in transaction code BP.

This regular expression example allows alphanumeric characters with spaces, periods, underscores, and dashes: ^[a-zA-Z0-9\s\._-]+$

Here is a breakdown of the regular expression I created:

There are different ways to build a regular expression, so I recommend looking at one or more of these sites for examples and tips:

https://regexr.com/

https://regex101.com/

https://regexlib.com/

Once you've created and tested your regular expression, go to the Map tab in your Transaction script, find the field you want to apply it to, click the Allowed Values icon on that row, select "Regular Expression List" in the dropdown, and enter your regular expression in the value column along with a helpful description in the description column:

Here is an example of the regular expression in action where the first row has special characters that aren't allowed while the second row uses special characters that are allowed (in column A):

I hope this tip sparks some ideas of how you can use regular expressions to improve data quality in SAP.

Thanks!

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Maria Ebner
Precisely Software Inc.
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Great tip Maria, I have used this for country specific phone number format validation, country specific zip code validation, and avoiding special characters in names (shown in your post). 

I am curious if there are more examples others can think of.