BW ABAP in routines

Question

Dear All,
I would need some ABAP help in a BW transformation routine. My ABAP knowledge is limited.
I have a source field called YQM_MASCHINE with various values, for example: CONE114-M014S002 and TUBE-M015S001. There can be many other different values, of course. The requirement is to fill 2  target fields (let us call them ABC and XYZ) from the source field YQM_MASCHINE field using the following 2 rules:
1) FIELD ABC = YQM_MASCHINE up to dash " - ", so in our example it would be CONE114 and TUBE. The dash and the strings after the dash need to be deleted.
The difficulty for me is that we do know where the dash falls in the character string so I cannot use RESULT = SOURCE_FIELDS-YQM_MASCHINE(n), because "n" can be take various values.
2) FIELD XYZ = YQM_MASCHINE without the last 4 characters, that means CONE114-M014 and TUBE-M015. So the values S002 and S001 need to be deleted from the original YQM_MASCHINE value. Again, I do not know how long the character string is.
A workaround for the first issue would be to use IF, ELSEIF, n times, until I find the dash...it is not a really nice solution, I guess.
l_mach = SOURCE_FIELDS-YQM_MASCHINE.
    IF l_mach(4) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(3).
    ELSEIF l_mach(5) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(4).
    ELSEIF l_mach(6) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(5).
    ELSEIF l_mach(7) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(6).
    ELSEIF l_mach(8) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(7).
    ELSEIF l_mach(9) = '-'.
      RESULT = l_mach(8).
    ELSE.
          ENDIF.
As mentioned, my ABAP is quite poor. There must be a way to find a dash in a string without doing many IF, ELSE...
For the rule number 2 I have no solution in my "dictionary".
Many thanks for your help.
Kind regards,
Csaba

Answer 1

Hi Amandeep,
thanks for your idea. The split works fine for the first rule, indeed. I had to include a check on the dash, since there are values with no dash, as well.
How would you do the 2nd rule where the last 4 characters need to be deleted? That is slightly different because the split is not done after the dash.
Many thanks,
Csaba
Rule 1 - okay
l_mach = SOURCE_FIELDS-YQM_MASCHINE.
    SEARCH l_mach FOR '-'.
    WRITE: / SY-SUBRC UNDER 'SY-SUBRC'.
    IF SY-SUBRC = 0.
      SPLIT SOURCE_FIELDS-YQM_MASCHINE AT '-' INTO s1 s2.
      RESULT = s1.