Regular expressions is a common technique to parse or validate strings in various programming languages.

Regular expressions in ABAP are available for some statements like FIND and REPLACE:

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FIND ALL OCCURRENCES OF REGEX lv_regexp
  IN lv_field
  SUBMATCHES lv_sub1 lv_sub2.

REPLACE ALL OCCURRENCES OF REGEX lv_regexp
  IN lv_input
  WITH lv_replacement.

Since the release of ABAP 6.40 the classes CL_ABAP_REGEX and CL_ABAP_MATCHER are available which provide a Java like experience with regular expressions:

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DATA:  lv_value TYPE string VALUE '1234567890'.

DATA:  lo_regexp  TYPE REF TO cl_abap_regex,
       lo_matcher TYPE REF TO cl_abap_matcher.

CREATE OBJECT lo_regexp
  EXPORTING
    pattern     = '[A-Z]'
    ignore_case = abap_true.

lo_matcher = lo_regex->create_matcher( text =  lv_value ).

IF lo_matcher->match( ) EQ abap_true.
  WRITE:/ 'Its a match'.

ELSE.
  WRITE:/ 'Not a match'.

ENDIF.

Testing regular expressions for ABAP is also super easy with the demo program DEMO_REGEX_TOY:

DEMO_REGEX_TOY