Everybody knows the "*" acts as a wildcard value in SAP's data entry fields. Did you also know that the "+" character does the same thing, but just for a single character ? It's common knowledge which is used in all modules and the *-character is probably the most used keyboard button - except for most alphabet keys. So how do you find the "*" value itself ? Anyone ?
So just to clarify, we are searching table entries which have a "*" as actual value, which is quite common in authorization matters. Here's a simple example: check table AGR_1251 and search field LOW for values "Z*" - not to be confused with "All values starting with a Z". For the examples below, there is a table with the following field values:
Z |
Z123 |
Zaltbommel |
Z* |
Z*3 |
Z+1=2 |
Z#23 |
For the examples above, we can specify wildcard search options, using special characters "*", "+" and "#". The "*" replaces any character or string of characters (even no characters), the "+" replaces a single character (which needs to be available) and the "#" can disable the wildcard function of characters. Thus "#*" is effectively processed as the character "*" and not the wildcard "*".
| Specify | Interpreted as | Examples |
| Z* | Return all values starting with a Z | Z, Z123, Zaltbommel, Z*, Z*3, Z+1=2, Z#23 |
| Z++* | Return all values starting with a Z, followed by at least 2 other characters | Z123, Zaltbommel, Z*3, Z+1=2, Z#23 |
| Z+++ | Return all values starting with a Z which are exactly 4 characters long | Z123, Z#23 |
| Z#+* | Return all values starting with Z+ | Z+1=2 |
| +#* | Return all values which have 2 characters of which the second character is a "*" | Z* |
| *##* | Return all values which contain a (at least one) "#" | Z#23 |
Happy value hunting !