Foreign function calls can mess with your status or even worse abort the transaction or report. There are a lot of function calls the use MESSAGE to inform/warn the user or use it without the optional RAISING in combination with an Abort or Error message type, which causes your nice transaction to abort. Well there is hope. ABAP knows the special error_messages exception which changes the way MESSAGEs are handled.

Yesterday I submitted a patch to the pygments bugtracker with a functioning lexer for ABAP. I hope that it'll be included in the next release.

A little example and the first public piece of ABAP code that has been highlighted with pygments.

REPORT z_hello_world.

PARAMETERS: gv_name TYPE text50.

WRITE: 'Hello', gv_name.

The lexer currently has one little problem. If you define a variable with the same name as an ABAP keyword, it'll also highlight that variable. Maybe I'll get around to fixing that, but that'll be quite a task since that means parsing every ABAP statement and not just highlighting the keywords.

A quick tip when working with ALV-Grids or transactions that use ALV-Grids and don't display changes to data structures.