After a recent Unicode upgrade, the author's company encountered issues with special characters appearing in printouts and reports. Specifically, the character '-' was being replaced with '#' in some purchase order details. After investigating, they discovered a new SAP note from August 14th that described the exact issue. The note explains that special hidden characters that are not defined in the Unicode character set can cause replacement characters like '#' to appear. The solution is to manually remove any undefined characters from the affected texts.

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Unwanted character ‘#’ in
the short text print outs
and reports
TOPICS: 2127749 2205846 Character '#'
Ossnote For Unicode Special Character Unicode Issue
POSTED BY: SAP YARD AUGUST 20, 2015
After our recent unicode upgrade, we have been
facing some issue in the character data. In the other
post, we showed how we figured out Code Page
Runtime Error. Last time there was one file which had
some special characters which caused the dump.
Today, we had one particular purchase order, which
had issue.
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Check the PO item short texts. There is no ‘#’
(Hash/Pound) symbol in the PO item texts.
But, when you trigger a form to print out the details,
the ‘-‘ character is replaced by ‘#’. Strangely, issue
was with just this PO. Other POs did not show this
symptom. Check the coloured arrows. ‘#’ character is
getting printed from no where..
In order to confirm how data was saved at database
level we checked PO item table ‘EKPO‘. In the table as
well, there was no clue of ‘#’. Now, we started
panicking. Did we do something wrong in our forms
runtime error mystery
DELETING rows of the
internal table within the
LOOP. Is it a Taboo? A big
NO NO?

3. 8/28/2015 Unwanted character ‘#’ in the short text print outs and reports | SAP Yard
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while developing it? We started doubting/questioning
ourselves.
Just to double check, we downloaded the EKPO table
to text file. To our surprise, ‘-‘ got replaced with ‘#’.
Now, we were sure, there was nothing wrong with our
form print out development object, but something fishy
was there in the way data was saved in the PO. By now
we narrowed down our suspicion to Unicode upgrade.
One of my senior colleague quickly checked if SAP has

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released any note for this issue. Guess what?? He
found a very new note. Fresh from the oven!!! We had
issue on 17th Aug 2015 and SAP had released a note
on 14th Aug 2015.. JIT (Just In Time)..
SAP Note: 2205846 – Character “#” in phrases,
user-defined texts, and reports
The note beautifully describes the issue. But there is
not solution. You have to correct the wrong text data.
Identify the issue document and remove the special
hidden characters which SAP is not able to identify.
The note also speaks of using a program to mass
change and create custom program by leveraging the
notes reference program.
Abstract from Snote 2205846.
Symptom
You edit a specification and you notice that the
character “#” appears in phrases or user-defined
texts, or, if applicable, in the corresponding long
texts, even though you did not expect it in this
context.
or
You view a report in your system in report management
or in the report information system, and you notice that
the system unexpectedly issues the character “#” in
this report.
Reason
If the character “#” is displayed as in the mentioned
cases, most of the time this means that there is a
character in this place that cannot be displayed with
the corresponding SAP character set, for example,
the character set 4103 for Unicode, because it is not

5. 8/28/2015 Unwanted character ‘#’ in the short text print outs and reports | SAP Yard
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defined in this character set; or the text contains a
control character in this place, such as LF (line feed)
Hex’0A’. This can occur particularly if you copy the
texts for phrases or user-defined texts from sources
that contain respective characters or control
characters, for example, MS Word documents.
Solution
To avoid these problems, we recommend that you not
copy these texts directly, but that you use an editor,
such as Notepad, as a clipboard that ignores the
respective formatting or already displays “#” as a
character, so that it is easy to correct these already in
the editor. Characters that are not included in the SAP
character set, for example, some dashes should be
replaced by the relevant characters from the SAP
character set, for example, “-“, or, if required, be deleted
completely.
If your system already contains phrases and user-defined
texts with these character, you can generally remove
these characters or control characters by editing the
relevant phrases and user-defined texts. During this, you
may have to replace large sections if control characters
influence the processing.
For mass correction refer to SAP Note 2127749.
Link to download PDF document of SAP Note
2205846.
Next time when you get some uninvited guests in your
texts, you know how to treat them..
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6 COMMENTS
ON "UNWANTED CHARACTER ‘#’ IN THE SHORT TEXT PRINT OUTS
AND REPORTS"
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Helpful post. Thanks once again SAPYARD.
Thanks Jithin.. Happy that
you found it helpful..
Regards,
Raju.
Hi Raju,
 
Jithin Joseph | August 26, 2015 at 2:22
pm | Reply
SAP Yard | August 26, 2015 at
4:26 pm | Reply
Mohamed Haarish | August 27, 2015 at
12:16 am | Reply

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This is really helpful! Thank you so much !
Regards,
Haarish
You are welcome Haarish..
Happy that you found it helpful..
Regards,
Raju.
Raju
We came across similar issue but this time
during Purchase requisition creation
(ME51N), this special character # along with
some number will appear under “item text”
for PR. I am not sure the same Note can be
applied ?
Thanks
Shishir
Hi Shishir – You can sit
SAP Yard | August 27, 2015 at
6:08 pm | Reply
shishir | August 27, 2015 at 5:27 pm |
Reply
SAP Yard | August 27, 2015 at
6:11 pm | Reply

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with your ABAPer and check the note. In
our project we did not implement the
note as the issue was with couple of
POs. The data analyst copied the right
text from notepad and updated the PO.
Later we figured it out that the issue was
while copying from a word document.
You can check how many PRs have issue
and then decide whether to correct
manually or through notes.
Regards,
Raju.
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