Concatenate hex and text into text in old versions

Question

Hello!
The code
DATA: v_hex1 TYPE x VALUE '0A',
      v_text1 TYPE char100,
      v_text2 TYPE char100.
CONCATENATE v_hex1 v_text1 INTO v_text2.
works fine on my 4.7 WAS 620 system. However, I've got complaints from other SDNers (I've posted a weblog with code) that they get systax error <i>V_HEX1 must be a character-type data object (data type C, N, D, T or String), field string).</i>
Is there an alternative, version-independant way, to concatenate hex and text into text?
My problem is that I don't have older SAP version available, so I can't test.
Thanks!
Igor

Answer 1

Hi Igor,
I have executed this very code on a 4.6C system and on a 4.0B system. I did not get any error. But if I change the type of v_hex to an integer, then I get the error which says the data type of v_hex should be C,N,D,T or string.
I wonder why I do not get the error even when v_hex is of type x.
Anyways, if the error does come, then may be we can use something like this -
DATA: v_hex1 TYPE x VALUE '0A',
      v_text1 TYPE char100,
      v_text2 TYPE char100.
write v_hex to v_text2.
CONCATENATE v_text2 v_text1 INTO v_text2.
This will not give you any error as such, but 0A is interpreted as a character string :-(.
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More surprisingly, if I execute your code on a 4.7 with WAS 640, I get the error you are talking about.
With some confusion,
Anand Mandalika.