SAP provides the CCC converter program to convert characters from an encoding to another one.

Table of contents

Character encoding (aka code page)

Character encoding is a name ("utf-8", "iso-8859-1", etc.) and an equivalence table with a set of characters and octet values for each of these characters.

Code page is the name that SAP uses instead of character encoding. Code pages have a 4-digit number instead of a character name.

Equivalences between Character encoding international name and SAP code page number

Some SAP programs expect:

• either a 4 characters code: you then have to enter the SAP code page number
  • You may find the SAP code page number from the international character encoding name by calling SCP_CODEPAGE_BY_EXTERNAL_NAME function module. Or you may look at TCP00A database table.
• or a 20 characters code: usually, you may either enter character encoding or SAP code page. Usually character encoding case is ignored.

Examples of a few equivalences:

Usual problems with Character encoding conversion

• Converting from one code page to another may be not possible for all characters of the source code page, because they do not exist in the target codepage.
  • For example, converting from big5 (Chinese) to us-ascii makes no sense. If you think that it should be possible, then you probably didn't choose the right .
  • In that case, we have to provide a replacement character to the CCC converter
• Sequence of bytes is not recognized as a character in the source code page. It means that:
  • either the sender program does not respect the code page (then ask the sender program to correct the error)
  • or you should choose another code page (sometimes, differences between code pages are very little)
  • or your program has erroneously shortened input bytes, last input byte(s) does mean nothing.
  • For example, the 2 only bytes D8 00 mean nothing in utf-16le: 2 following bytes are expected to be able to identify the character (here encoded on 4 bytes).

How to call the CCC converter

CCC converter is a kernel program which may be accessed by several programs:

• CL_ABAP_CODEPAGE class, available since 7.02. The code page cannot be the SAP number, it must be either the "Character encoding international name", or the name as used in java language.
• CL_ABAP_CONV_* classes, since 6.10, where CL_ABAP_CONV_OBJ is the master class which gives full access to CCC converter. There are also these classes which call CCC converter with default values:
  • CL_ABAP_CONV_IN_CE: converts bytes representing characters in a given codepage into a character or string variable
  • CL_ABAP_CONV_OUT_CE: converts a character or string variable into bytes representing characters in a given codepage
  • CL_ABAP_CONV_X2X_CE: converts bytes representing characters in a given codepage, into bytes representing characters in another given codepage
• SCP_TRANSLATE_CHARS function module, works with all releases

Note: CCC stands for Character set Conversion Cache, a memory area where SAP stores the code pages it needs for conversions.

Links

• SDN blog - BSP - a Developer's Journal: Part VII - Dealing with multiple languages (English, German, Spanish, Thai, and Polish), by Thomas Jung
• What is Unicode
• Unicode Transformation Format
• SAP library:
  • Internationalization
  • Character codes: short explanation of character encoding
  • Data conversion: short explanation of conversion possibilities in ABAP